Storing in public a rough note of an ultracrepidatary half-formed thought/position had/held talking with Tony:
Professional craft is a response to scarcity. Where there is no scarcity, there is no need for professional craft. It becomes personal based on subjective drivers. Opinions, points-of-view, and reportage are now non-scarce. In the post-postfilter world, what professional crafts do we look to?
Petafloptimism 
This is really interesting point. I’m currently writing a paper for a project being run by the architect’s profession – see http://www.architecture.com/go/Architecture/Debate/Futures_2038.html – on something pretty similar, and I think the issue has to come down to membership, that is social capital, not intellectual capital. A professional (in this case an architect) has reputation by virtue of membership. As you say, there is no scarcity of information any more, and scarcity is normally what determines value; but there is a scarcity of trust. Perversely, the more information and opinion that we have at our finger tips, the less we find ourselves able to trust it. But lowering barriers to publishing/opinion-giving can be met with raising barriers to membership of given associations or clubs.
This is really interesting point. I’m currently writing a paper for a project being run by the architect’s profession – see http://www.architecture.com/go/Architecture/Debate/Futures_2038.html – on something pretty similar, and I think the issue has to come down to membership, that is social capital not intellectual capital. A professional (in this case an architect) has reputation by virtue of membership. As you say, there is no scarcity of information any more, and scarcity is normally what determines value; but there is a scarcity of trust. Perversely, the more information and opinion that we have at our finger tips, the less we find ourselves able to trust it. But lowering barriers to publishing/opinion-giving can be met with raising barriers to membership of given associations or clubs.
Professional craft is not only about scarcity, it’s about authority and reliability. Reading and writing ceased to be magical craft skills centuries ago, and accessing similar content through new media is going through similar processes: but a social need for authority and reliability in the content of some types of information thereby transferred does not diminish.
Publishers may be side-lined as new media develop simple-input/complex-output techniques; but while you can rely on everybody’s individual expertise on their own opinions, you would expect some sort of certification for, say, architects or health advice. So while the publishers may well eventually lose a stranglehold over scholarly publishing to new electronic accesses, the system of some sort of editorial reviewing will stay.
And quite apart from that, the very volume of new material from the previously unpublished requires the skills of evaluation, organisation, indexing, retrieval. The casual, subjective and chronological approaches are not enough.
And another thing:
I’m not a designer, but I would have thought that, as the user-internet interface goes through the same process of abstraction and additional degrees of separation from what makes everything work as every other sort of machine-user interface, there is always a need for the expert who can explain, advise and back up the explanation and advice with solid research on, e.g., what users really do (rather than what they say they do, or on what they think they need, or what the producer thinks they like, or ought to like, need and do, or what the company chairman’s brother-in-law told him sounded like a whizzy gizmo that everyone ought to have).