Peter Nicholson of the Council of Canadian Academies has an interesting paper that he has given on The Changing Nature of Intellectual Authority. His thesis is:
People today are much less prepared to defer to the experts. But at the same time, we are being swamped with data and information – a glut that cries out for analysis and summary. So there’s a dilemma. Who to turn to? Increasingly the answer is – Well, to ourselves of course, as individuals empowered by a world wide web that has rapidly evolved into a social medium. More specifically, it is a medium that today supports massively distributed collaboration on a global scale that – we can only hope – will help us make sense of it all.
He talks about the “decline of deference” to traditional authorities (from the church to academic experts) and talks about it taking place recently. I suspect its been happening since the enlightenment began and might be a general feature of modernity and improved communication (and democratic institutions.) What is new is the ability of the many to replace authority with a distributed or networked authority. People now believe things are true if they have been negotiated by a community. Something is true enough if it won’t get you in trouble because your crowd has authorized the truth. Most of the time such negotiated truth is fine (with enough eyeballs someone will point out a flaw), but other times the community misses something and is satisfied with not-quite-good-enough.