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Marshall McLuhan's view on the "social media expert"

Ross Dawson, August 24, 2009 8:05 PM US PT

I was just asked "what is a social media expert"?

Marshall McLuhan is still the oracle. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the master.

"Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialise, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The 'expert' is the man who stays put."
- Marshall McLuhan

In other words, a "social media expert" is an oxymoron - it cannot exist. The true trailblazers who forge new paths for the rest are the amateurs, the ones who are continually trying new things because they do NOT know. Anyone who truly understands social media would never pretend otherwise.

I wrote down this quote a dozen years ago because it so accurately reflected the way I felt about 'professionals' and 'amateurs'. Amidst today's extraordinary pace of change this outlook is in fact far more relevant than it ever has been before.

Celebrate the amateur!

4 Comments

Barry said:

That is true if you restrict the 'social media expert' term to practitioners. One can become an expert in understanding social media - new media studies, social media studies and the like - without it being tautological.

In any case, McLuhan's description of experts as uncritically accepting the rules of the environment only works as an absolute if you called Picasso and Dali amateur painters - which they patently were not. There aren't one set of values and practices for experts and another for amateurs, but a range of values, practices and acceptances.

McLuhan's a great polemicist, not a particularly great analyst.

August 24, 2009 9:08 PM

Barry said:

sorry, not tautological. oxymoronic.

August 24, 2009 9:48 PM

mutuelle said:

mc luchans is a specialist no

August 25, 2009 11:38 PM

Ian Bruce said:

Hard to know what McLuhan would have made of social media (arguably a tautology itself). He'd have recognized the indetity crisis it creates, and the flatness and what he would have called the "deep cold" of the medium. The guy was out there a lot of the time...

September 19, 2009 2:11 PM

Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-up Repyoot.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.