I am reading Clay Shirky’s book, “Here Comes Everybody” and find that much of it is relevant to the work of RWB. In it, he writes about the fact that technology has brought about a “mass amateurization” to journalism. At a time when anybody can write a blog (like this one) the lines drawn between who is and is not a professional journalist are becoming increasingly blurry. Shirky discusses how calling something a “profession” brings with it particular norms about what it is and what it should be. These norms are not generated or enforced by the consumers of the profession but by the professionals themselves since they have an investment in maintaining those norms and bringing clarity to who should and should not be part of the profession. He continues to suggest that there are many positive aspects of this including the maintenance of standards and competence.
He points out, however, that in some ways, there is inherent hypocrisy in professional structures. Professionals become “gatekeepers” by providing a “desirable social function but also by controlling that function” and sometimes, “what has once been a service has become a bottleneck.”
So I wonder if our current approaches to sharing and disseminating research have become a bottleneck for the sake of maintaining some of the structures of our profession for the sake of themselves, rather than for the sake of ensuring quality.