The Death of Expertise - Tom Nichols

The Death of Expertise

The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
272 Seiten
2017
Oxford University Press Inc (Verlag)
978-0-19-046941-2 (ISBN)
24,90 inkl. MwSt
From the anti-vaccination movement to citizen blogging to uninformed attacks on GMOs, the nation has witnessed a surge in intellectual egalitarianism. While increased access to information undoubtedly brings some societal benefits, the leap to enlightenment that millions of lightly educated people believe they make after scouring WebMD or Wikipedia undermines established sources of knowledge.
People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, this rejection of experts has occurred for many reasons, including the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement.

Nichols has deeper concerns than the current rejection of expertise and learning, noting that when ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy-or in the worst case, a combination of both. The Death of Expertise is not only an exploration of a dangerous phenomenon but also a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age.

Tom Nichols is Professor of National Security Affairs at the US Naval War College, an adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School, and a former aide in the U.S. Senate. He is also the author of several works on foreign policy and international security affairs, including The Sacred Cause, No Use: Nuclear Weapons and U.S. National Security, Eve of Destruction: The Coming Age of Preventive War, and The Russian Presidency.

Table of Contents ; Introduction ; A Nation of Explainers ; Chapter One ; Higher Education: The Customer is Always Right ; Chapter Two ; Let me Google That for You: The Impact of the Internet ; Chapter Three ; History is Bunk, and So is Science: How Conversation Became Exhausting ; Chapter Four ; The New Journalism - and New Journalists ; Chapter Five ; Don't Blame Us: Why Expertise and Policy Aren't the Same Thing ; Chapter Six ; When the Experts are Wrong ; Conclusion ; Democracy, Expertise, and Citizenship

Erscheinungsdatum
Verlagsort New York
Sprache englisch
Maße 213 x 142 mm
Gewicht 422 g
Themenwelt Mathematik / Informatik Informatik Web / Internet
Recht / Steuern EU / Internationales Recht
Sozialwissenschaften Kommunikation / Medien Medienwissenschaft
Wirtschaft Betriebswirtschaft / Management
ISBN-10 0-19-046941-2 / 0190469412
ISBN-13 978-0-19-046941-2 / 9780190469412
Zustand Neuware
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