Long Live the Experts
Text: Paul M H Buvarp
Photography: Caroline Hargreaves and Paul M H Buvarp
Viral marketing. Blink advertisement. Meta-sites and a surge of user-interaction. These are the marks of Generation C. Never before have people been so interconnected, so in touch with the world. Twitter, YouTube, Facebook. People separated only by the nanosecond it takes to electrically circumnavigate the world. This has major impacts on our experience of the globe and of each other.
Where to begin? Blogs are a good example of the greater trend. Millions of people writing away on any topic between play and politics, selling opinions for publicity or simply making sly remarks about every-day life. The plains here are limitless, and information roams free. Minutes after a news-story breaks, someone blogs about it from halfway around the world. Comments bloom and fall into disarray or public debate. All of this free and virtually instantaneous.
We are facing a group of people so opinionated and so world-educated that nothing is holy anymore. An expert on solar physics can easily be a 17 year-old high-school student from a small town in Montana. A political analysis by CNN can be trumped by a stay-at-home mom blogging at 2 in the morning. An anonymous Chinese blogger could topple his government.
