Experts, Authorities, Arbiters, Curators – Who needs them?

In the context of culture, I do, but not like I used to. I want them to fulfill a different role in culture, but I’m not completely sure what that role should be. Maybe their role is to help me with the “why” of the thing I’m engaging with and no longer help me with the “what” I should be engaging with.

For the “what” I’ve already turned completely to the wisdom of the community. I adore the crowd-sourced app Yelp and whenever I get to eat out I’m compelled to use it on my phone or on the web to choose the restaurant, or the “what” that I’m going to. What ceases to fascinate me is that it’s a tool that’s co-created by its users and that only gets better as more users participate by contributing ratings to it. It gets to constantly grow and constantly improve over time – to infinity. I don’t need the expert Zagat or Michelin (I’ve never used Michelin btw, but just saying… though I’d like to now on second thought. Who’s buying?).

For movies, I never go to one without looking at the aggregate critic score and user score on metacritic. This is probably the worst thing you can do to an arts critic. Metacritic turns their review into a number and then averages the numbers across dozens of national publications. So instead of treating and respecting their essays as “criticism”, Metacritic reduces all of them to just consumer reports and then finds the aggregate opinion for a particular movie. I don’t mind that at all and I find it extremely useful in choosing the movie I get to see.

So where does this leave the expert, the arbiter? Maybe their role in culture needs a conceptual mash up. Check out Chefs Feed on the iPhone which is my favorite app that I’ve never used. This mashes up the 20th Century with the 21st Century, making everybody happy.