Technocratic hierarchies of expertise

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The analysis of the interview data with the super-users and their postings within Brave Boards led to the identification of three types of forum users with respect to expertise: the novice user (with little to no expertise), the self-proclaimed expert (a person new to the forum who claims to have extensive knowledge in the subject) and the user-accepted expert (a person who has invested substantial time in contributing to the forum and has demonstrated their knowledge to other users).

Three types of interactions with technocratic dimensions were derived from the varying types of expertise: novice with self-proclaimed expert, novice with user-accepted expert and self-proclaimed expert with user-accepted expert. These three novice-expert interactions are manifested through questions posted on the forum by the novices, which are in turn answered by the experts. In such situations, we remarked that novices do not distinguish between the self-proclaimed experts’ and the user-accepted experts’ responses, leading to a somewhat blind acceptance of the answer to a query, regardless of its source or validity. The main distinguishing factor is the time invested in the forum, with the user-accepted experts contributing more to discussions within the forum. As a result of prolonged interactions with each other, the user-accepted experts tend to form a smaller clique and act as the forum's experts. When discussing various topics on one forum with another long-time user, super-user Armen simply stated, “[w]e are the experts”. This clique of user-accepted experts governs itself and its members interact with each other using language which would otherwise be considered unbecoming. Jenny outlined this attitude of homophily (McPherson, Smith-Lovin & Cook, 2001) while discussing novices and self-proclaimed experts making derogatory remarks to user-accepted experts:

“It’s ok to talk shit and make unacceptable remarks with each other because we know each other [...] but if it’s someone who hasn’t been around for a while, we won’t accept that.”