They say that knowledge is power – but I’ve always felt this phrase has left out the most important factor in the equation: power lies where there is a deficit of knowledge.  This has been obvious throughout history.  In ancient times, the priests and witch doctors ruled the roost.  As access to a more scientific understanding of the world around us improved – that is to say, as levels of general education increased – so the deficit between the general populace and the priests and witch doctors decreased.  And the power of the latter waned considerably.

These days, when we go to our GP we often go armed with all kinds of explanations for the symptoms we believe we are suffering from.  This may complicate both their and our lives – but it’s a clear example of how the general population can be dumbed up by the heady combination of technology and teaching that is 21st century life.

Some professions still resist what we might argue is an inevitable process of historical change: the legal profession, for example, still sustains that arcane language is needed to make precise the mission and execution of the law.  I would question whether this is entirely the case: the use of complex registers doesn’t prevent bad laws from being passed for example, whilst it most certainly does make it difficult for the vast majority of the law’s objects to acquire the knowledge necessary to understand when they may be committing an infraction.

Without, that is, the expensive support the legal profession makes a living from.

And so, of course, I must ask another question: if a complex register can be made simple and understandable for a fee, why not for none?  Why not couch the law in simple terms most of us can understand – especially given the fact that most of us have to obey it?

Another group of these navel-gazing parties – a group which seems, at the moment, to be fiercely resisting this surely inevitable process whereby knowledge deficits between subjects and objects are minimised through education – is what we might charitably call the profession of politics.  Whilst journalism has had no alternative but to take on board the manifest competition from social media which cheap and global peer-to-peer communication implies, as well as the resulting professionalisation of its participants this invokes, politicians have been less than ready to accept that the value they used to add to the political process is now being sorely tested.

To be honest, both social media and the Internet more generally are simply a continuation – a savagely unstoppable multiplication if you like – of a process which started long ago with the first printing presses and political pamphlets.  Social media, the Internet and tools such as search engines do, however, allow us to register far more easily how the added value I mention above is decreasing – perhaps exponentially, certainly irrevocably.

In the past, we needed professional politicians to mediate our understanding of the world around us.  What’s happening now, however, is the final leg of a very long journey which started around the time of the Gutenberg Bible.  Essentially, what we are living today, in this revolution of Great Communicators we are all becoming, is the professionalisation of Joe and Joanna Public – in political terms, the considerable, incredible and thundering reversal of roles.  In this way, the knowledge deficit is turning full circle: just one example close to my heart – many social media users now know far more about what makes the digital economy tick than the vast majority of British MPs and lords ever will.

The professionalisation of Joe and Joanna Public is enough to make the privileged professions tremble.  Their power and wealth lies in maintaining such knowledge deficits.  When historical tendencies overwhelm their ability to maintain them is when they realise, perhaps too late, that resistance is futile.

Or, at least, it should be.

The Internet access to all kinds of information we currently enjoy, best exemplified by Google’s search engine, is what is driving this process of dumbing up I have already described.  And the role of social media is simply to further share, magnify and cement the elimination of privilege, in a consistent and persistent way which I believe this planet – and our species – has never experienced before.