The Rise of the Amateur Expert
Many years ago I saw a hilarious comic whose name escapes me, and who my Google-Fu cannot locate, but who made laugh with one line: I am a writer. [sotto voce] I write checks. Mostly fiction.
Twenty years ago, being a ‘writer’ meant publishing - being a professional writer meant sending your work to a magazine, a journal, or a book publisher, having it accepted, seeing it in print, often months after you wrote it. Sometimes years. Or it meant you were that annoying guy that ate all the brie at every party and went on and on an on about your one unpublished but brilliant novel. But one of the things I love so much about the internet is how it makes everyone with a point of view a writer. Even me! Maybe not a good writer, but a published one.
What is even more astonishing to me is how fast the culture has changed to accommodate this shift in communication. In 1995, when I read Carolyn’s online diary, I can remember thinking to myself how big this was going to be - how monumentally huge it would be if everyone had a platform for personal expression. And then they did, and that is a story for another day, the history of online diaries, but she was the first, and I think what she did in publishing her diary online opened the floodgates for the vast scope of personal expression we see today.
One of my favourite categories in that vast scope is what I call in my bookmarks and de.licio.us account “Amateur Experts”.