At the Medialab in Paris: Expertise and de-professionalisation

I am in the space-crafty medialab in Paris. Hidden in the basement of Science Po Paris, a workshop on digital methods and social traceability is taking place. It is organised by the Medialab, the CERI (Centre d?etudes internationals), and CRESC (Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change). One of the issues is how the digital is changing who can claim expertise as well as the methodologies through which this can be claimed.

We are now in the afternoon discussion looking at the kind of questions that emerge from digital data ? the internet ? having blurred the distinction between the data expert ? the professional who is paid and specifically trained to produce and associate data ? and the data amateur. The rise of the amateur data producer and analyst (the production of news data through mobile phones, the production of specialised demographic data using data available on the internet) is sometimes seen as democratisation. What does democratisation mean here? The diffusion of data production and turning data into information over more people is not necessarily democratisation. Locating the question of democracy at the point of the blurring, relaxing of the boundaries between amateurs and experts seems to conceptualise democratisation as de-professionalisation. Professionalisation refers to being paid to produce expertise, recognition through institutional location, diploma, etc. De-professionalisation is then opening the claim of expertise beyond the professionals. But what does that mean? Diffusion does not in itself imply a diffusion of authority. The question that arises than is how is authority temporarily, maybe even only for a fleeting moment, crafted and recrafted through the reconfiguration of what counts as data, data producers, and information producers in relation to particular disputes, controversies, etc.?

Methodologically a double issue arises: 1) what kinds of methodology are being used by the knowledge producers that participate in the dispute, controversy, and how do they associate what and what kind of knowledge do they claim (truth, morality, aesthetic, gossip, ?) & 2) does diffusing of data and information producers and production require more associative techniques of political analysis, of trying to find what matters when?

The second issue requires another question: what conceptions of the political (of the politics of insecurity e.g.) are produced in the methodology deployed in analysing configurations of disputes and controversies in a situation of de-professionalising?