Finding common ground: Reflections on experts and expertise - What is expertise?

The contribution discusses how expertise is being reconfigured under conditions of digital transformation. From a sociology of science and science communication perspective, expertise is understood not merely as specialized knowledge, but as the socially acquired ability to interpret, evaluate, communicate, and apply knowledge in context. Expertise is also relational: actors become experts when others attribute particular authority and interpretive competence to them.
Against this background, the contribution shows that structural factors such as gender, institutional position, reputation, journalistic routines, and accumulated visibility significantly shape who becomes publicly recognized as an expert. The frequently diagnosed “crisis of expertise” is understood less as a decline in the importance of expertise than as an increasing contestation of whose knowledge is considered legitimate. Digital media and, in particular, generative AI further transform where expertise is sought, mediated, and evaluated. Generative AI is not conceptualized as an expert in the strict sense, but rather as an epistemic infrastructure or mediating technology that fundamentally reshapes the conditions under which expertise is communicated, accessed, recognized, and challenged.