This is really a follow-on thought from yesterday's post on the internet age difficulty of determining which products and services are materially more worthwhile than others; materially worthwhile in the sense of sustaining critical review beyond 5 stars and a few happy tweets.

There's an extent to which the democratization of traditional media distribution whether that be journalism or music, of creative photography with smartphone apps like Instagram and of software development and distribution courtesy of app stores is to be welcomed as some grand utopian liberty as much as we should be wary of it.

However, universal empowerment does not equal universal ability and the problem is, as an amateur [insert instant web enabled profession], you don't know what you don't know; you only look like you do.

The supposed positive outputs of creative or entrepreneurial democratization are, aside from giving millions of people more interesting hobbies, the chance that the next great inventor, performer, author or business genius may not remain undiscovered as they would have done before the web. The shitty end of that stick, though, is the encouragement of incompetence, however undeliberate or excusable it may be, in the provision of products and services.

It used to be the case that if something looked like a duck, swam like a duck, and quacked like a duck, then it probably was a duck. Today it could just as easily turn out to be a dog.