Yesterday I did a post about the humiliation of Jews and Palestinians that quoted Geoffrey Wawro’s new book, and a passage in which Wawro wrote that Hitler’s party won a majority in the 1932 elections in Germany.
Within an hour or two I got two notes, from Mark Wauck and Harry Clark, telling me that Wawro was wrong, that Hitler did not win a majority in the ’32 elections. I promptly posted Wauck’s correction.
I think this is important. Wawro is a big deal academic with a fancy endowed chair. Clark is a civilian, a writer and amateur historian. So is Wauck, a blogger and wideranging reader.
Yet on the playing field of the internet, the two amateurs put the ball in the back of the net, and Wawro didn’t.
This is an important moment. The internet is demonstrating that knowledge, and the assembly of facts to make an argument, are not what I grew up thinking them to be, the sovereign province of academics and journalists who went to fancy schools and networked and yes, worked hard, but created professional/social barriers to entry into their guild.
No, all human beings can acquire knowledge, and many of them are really good at expressing that knowledge.
In time this radical democratization of the means of expression will undermine traditional status in universities and the mainstream media, and income as well. As I say here often, the internet is doing to those priesthoods what the printing press did to the clerical establishment. It’s amazing to watch.
