Abstract
Experts play a number of important roles in society (e.g., doctors, lawyers, scientists). Much of their social function is communicative, and as a public we rely in various ways on these communications. Access to experts and expert information is largely a function of media. As our information and communication media have evolved in recent years, so too must our methods for assessing the accuracy, truthfulness and usefulness of information. The current study examines how modern media, particularly television and the internet, have affected communication both between experts and the public, and among communities of experts. This is demonstrated by the analysis various forms of expert communications: a scientific journal article, news coverage of a political event, and televised advertisements for law firms. It is argued that the greater the premium a society places on specialized knowledge and skills, the more we are obligated to trust experts, and this entails a greater responsibility of “the media” to connect the public to experts in transparent and useful ways. Trust the Experts: The Importance of Media in Connecting Experts to the Public

Contemporary “first world” society relies heavily on specialization and the distribution of labour. The complexity of our collective activities is beyond the capacity of any individual, and thus social responsibilities are divided largely on the basis of profession (Mieg, 2006). We entrust doctors with our health, lawyers with our legal issues, teachers with our educations, government officials with domestic and international policy issues, real estate developers and urban planners with the evolution of our cities’ infrastructures, etc. This creates an often invisible issue for the public: we rely on a variety of experts for the successful navigation of modern life, and in many cases, we are incapable of accurately assessing the information or services they provide us.

Because of this reliance on experts, we are forced to trust them. This has led some researchers to postulate that “trust in expert systems is perhaps the core dilemma of modernity… Because of the complexity of modern societies, we cannot but rely on expert judgment and expert services in many domains of life”, (Mieg, 2006, p. 754; see also Giddens, 1990).

While our reliance on experts is not new, our modes of interaction with them are quickly changing. Because of access to information via the internet, it is now possible for a patient to know more about their diagnosis than their physician (Donaldson, 2003), for a client to collaborate meaningfully with their lawyer, for a layperson to uncover inconsistencies and lies in political discourse, and so on. The changes in expert-public interactions made possible by developments in modern information and communication technologies have social implications which are not yet fully appreciated or understood. The current study addresses these changes in the context of trusting experts. How do modern media affect our methods and ability to assess the accuracy, truthfulness, and usefulness of information provided to us by experts? We turn first to the growing recognition of the importance of trusting experts. We will examine various types of “expert communication”: a scientific journal article, news coverage of a political event, and television advertisements for law firms. These examples will allow us to investigate how form and trust interact in audience reception. It is then argued that because information is being compiled, distributed and accessed in increasingly decentralized and deregulated ways, assessing a source of information is becoming more difficult. This demands of media institutions that they take greater care in mediating expert-public relations, and at the same time requires individuals to develop new strategies to evaluate sources. Trust the Experts Webster’s New World Dictionary (1968) defines an expert as “one who is very skillful and well-informed in some special field” (p. 168)[1]. Expertise refers, therefore, to the set of skills and knowledge that allow one to perform well in some domain. These skill sets take an enormous variety of forms, from flying a fighter jet to playing an entire game of chess blindfolded to solving differential calculus. In some domains there are objective criteria for distinguishing experts from non-experts. Expert tennis or chess players will almost always beat less skilled opponents; medical specialists are far more likely to diagnose a disease correctly than are medical residents; and expert musicians are capable of performing pieces that novices are not. In other domains, however, the criteria are often less clear and more subjective. Examples of this include the selection of stocks, treating psychotherapy patients, and predicting weather patterns (Ericsson, 2006). In some cases, the status of expert is less tightly coupled to performance, per se, and is instead dependent on socially regulated accreditation or evaluation systems. Examples of this type of expert are lawyers, politicians, and teachers. There has been significant research done in recent years on the social function of experts (Clancey, 2006). This work has focused on several components of ‘expert’ as a social role, including the experts’ roles as communicators, decision makers, units of professional accountability, teachers, and wielders of social influence (see Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006 for a review). One concern of this research that has been relevant both publically and scientifically is the trust we place in experts. Several recent books directed at the general public have had titles evoking this concern in rather dramatic ways: Wrong: Why experts keep failing us--And how to know when not to trust them, (Freedman, 2010); Science: Can you trust the experts?, (Gilland, 2006); Trust us, We’re experts!: How industry manipulates science and gambles with your future (Stauber & Rampton, 2001). Notice in all of these titles the mention of both ‘experts’ and ‘trust’. Why is this? This relationship is also being investigated by academics. Mieg (2006) has asked about the role of experts as “units of accountability”, why we trust experts and whether we should. He writes, “The beginning of the 21st century brought along some spectacular cases of misled trust in experts in the financial sector, for example, the Enron case and the failures of accounting firms on the one hand, and the cases of financial analysts who promoted the products of their clients, pushing stock prices ever higher, on the other”. The effect that these misplacements of trust had on society, and the coverage they received, highlights what Meig (2001) calls the “legitimizing use of experts”. In the context of institutionalizing the forms of scientific discourse, (Evetts, Mieg, & Felt, 2006) claim that a “problem of trust” necessarily arises when the majority of people only have access to certain information in a mediated way. We turn now to briefly to the general question of how we comprehend mediated communications, and then to considerations of media affect our access to experts, and how that simultaneously influences or relationship of trust.
Mediated Access to Experts Marshall McLuhan’s famous adage “the medium is the message”, (McLuhan, 1964) can be elaborated on in the languages of the modern sciences. We can ask the question of how information is understood by an audience, as a function of medium, in a number of ways and at a number of levels. We can start by agreeing that the result that incoming information will have on an individual is some admixture of an interaction between pre-existing psychological or cognitive structures and the form of the information as that person receives it. We know that we bring to bear different senses, different neuro-cognitive mechanisms, and different evaluative strategies when we read a book than when we watch television, for example. This family of questions about decoding information concerns many disciplines, including psychology, cognitive neuro-science, sociology, philosophy, communications theory, engineering, and so on. The relationship between media and trust is introduced as a high level conceptual concern, in order to limit the space of the question. This is achieved by asking whether the method by which we access expert information affects how much trust we place in it. Let us consider two forms of mediated access to experts. The first is a graphic in a scientific publication. This is chosen as representative content of professional scientific communication, and of the way scientists generally access the work and ideas of other scientists. The article serves as a proxy for access to the scientist. The second case is using Google to search for television advertisements for law offices. Television advertisements for law firms were chosen as a comical but representative case of the public’s mediated access to experts. A similar analysis could be done with pharmaceutical advertising, televised presidential debates, and so on. Google was chosen because it normally carries more than 90 percent of the internet’s search traffic, and thus is a principle factor in the public’s access to information (Arthur, 2012). The graphic below (Fig. 1) is taken from Mieg (2006), in chapter 41 of the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise (Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, & Hoffman, 2006). The fact that this graphic is in a scientific handbook indicates a certain level of validity within the scientific community. Related to this, Ericsson (2006) writes: “A significant milestone is reached when a field of scientific research matures to a point warranting publication of its first handbook (p. 3).

[pic] Fig. 1. “The-expert”-interaction. Taken from Mieg, 2006, p. 747. But in looking at this graphic, a number of difficult questions immediately arise. What is meant by these concepts, such as, knowledge, function, relative relevance, or “The expert”-interaction? How are they defined or quantified by the author? What do the arrows represent, if anything? Are the spatial relationships meaningful? All of them, or only some? What about typographical features such as the shade, or bold vs. italics? How much of that differentiating detail is conveying information about the theoretical model the graphic is representing, and how much of it is meant to serve as “visual heuristics”, clues as to how to decompose the scene; put another way, is some information included primarily to reduce load on working memory? Some of these questions are addressed in the text that accompanies the graphic. This creates a problem in analysis. If we need the text to fully understand the graphic, what is the purpose of the graphic to begin with? Is the graphic conveying new information, helping structure other information, or both? These questions are meant to demonstrate that assessing the impact of form on reception is exceedingly difficult. What is important to note though, is that the content of the graphic, and of the chapter from which it was taken, are pre-established as trustworthy and reliable by fact of being included in a scientific handbook. Certain forms of access to experts are institutionalized in society in ways that function as pre-validation of information from those experts (Clancey, 2006). The peer review process of science is one, the educational and licensing requirements of doctors and lawyers another. If we consider information ‘returned from a Google search of “television advertisements lawyers” or “bush florida 2000”, we are attempting to access our experts, lawyers or politicians, using the medium of the internet.[2] This creates a number of issues that will affect our perceptions of trustworthiness. First is the fact that Google’s computer algorithms are responsible for “information triage”. With tens of millions of results returned, it is not possible for an individual to examine all potential sources. The onus of trust is first placed on Google, to provide us with relevant and balanced material. Videos from television news broadcasts, newspaper articles, scholarly studies, and so on will be returned by the search. The locus of trust is thus transferred to whichever result the user selects. If the user chooses a television news network segment about the Bush-Gore campaign, are there hidden political biases in the reporting? If the user chooses a web-page titled “Top 10 most ridiculous lawyer commercials”, can this be considered access to experts? If the user watches these 10 videos, he will likely be receiving information that originated with the expert (the lawyer), that was then compiled by media professionals, is commented on (implicitly and/or explicitly) by the compiler of the collection of the ridiculous commercials, and perhaps finally by other internet users who have left comments. What the above paragraph implies is that access to society’s experts through the internet is mediated through several layers or filters. The internet is the intersection point of multiple criteria of trust, or mechanisms of pre-validating information, and conditions of validity are much less strictly defined or enforced on the internet. This makes it much more difficult for the audience to establish the trustworthiness of information. An adequate analysis of media content by the recipient requires familiarity with several overlapping and contradictory standards of veracity, relevance, honesty, etc. While this ability to differentiate trustworthy sources from untrustworthy ones has always been required of an audience, it has never been as crucial or as difficult as it is today.

Conclusion As our society has become increasingly complex and specialized, it has become impossible to fulfill the ideals of “The Renaissance Man”, skillful and learned in all aspects of one’s life. We are forced to rely on experts for many things: fixing our cars, diagnosing illness, teaching children, fighting wars, or leading a nation. We need access to experts, and our media are responsible, in many cases, for providing that access. Whether it is advertising, journal publications, televised debates, or newspaper reporting, The word “media” is often used in two senses. One is to refer to the technologies for transmitting information. Much work remains to be done before we understand how various forms of information delivery affect our use or reception of that information, and how this may affect judgements of trust. This line of inquiry is sure to produce interesting research in the coming years. But “media” is also often used as shorthand for the cultural-information production industry, for the institutions and individuals responsible for writing and releasing newspapers, magazines, television programs, and websites. Understanding how the media in this sense affects our trust of experts falls outside the scope of science and into the realm of social theory and social responsibility. As we continue to develop our methods of access to the growing corpus of human knowledge, we will need intelligent and responsible policy that promotes access to expert information in ways that serve the public. Transparency in politics, finance, and science require that we have media which truthfully connect us to our experts. We need to be able to trust our experts; we cannot cope with modern life without them. And as the world becomes more globalized, more specialized, and more decentralized, we will rely ever more on our media to connect us to our experts.
References
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[1] The concept of “expertise” as it is used in the scientific literature is a complex one, and a full treatment of it is beyond the scope of this article. See chapter 1 of the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (Erikson, Charness, Feltovich, Hoffman, eds., 2006) for a discussion.
[2] It may be argued that in this capacity, the internet functions more as a “meta-medium”, providing access to a number of media which it subsumes, such as print and audio-visual material. For the sake of simplicity, and the purposes of this article, “the internet” is treated as a medium in its own right.