Socrates, the original Blogger

I thought I would share with you all a great comment from Phil Jones I came a cross while wandering around Nicholas Carr's weblog:

Socrates was just some guy (a stone-mason) who wandered around picking arguments with people in the market-place. He fisked his opponents with nit-picking fine-grained carping over details; made all sorts of outrageous anti-commonsensical claims - which an echo-chamber of dittoheads all dumbly agreed with; never respected any formal learning institutions or professionalism; and annoyed most people to the point of wanting to kill him. How do you get more blog than that?

Hilarious! So, on that note, Nicholas Carr has some good (and controversial) things to say about "Web 2.0", but I disagree totally with his position that the "cult of the amateur" is a dangerous force on the web. The reality is that we're all amateurs - I don't care how much specialized expertise you have in some area, one day in the future people will look back on your understanding as quaint and childish. The "cult of the dishonest" is a much more dangerous, and real, force on the web. Deliberately claiming to know more than you do, or citing facts you know to be false, is dangerous. Spouting off about something you're not credentialed for is just human nature.