Public Intellectuals R Us - Discuss....

Daniel Drezner: Public Intellectual 2.0:

".....The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the Internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that "the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all 'gotcha' commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible." David Frum complains that "the blogosphere takes on the scale and reality of an alternative world whose controversies and feuds are ... absorbing." David Brooks laments, "People in the 1950s used to earnestly debate the role of the intellectual in modern politics. But the Lionel Trilling authority figure has been displaced by the mass class of blog-writing culture producers."

But these critics fail to recognize how the growth of blogs and other forms of online writing has partially reversed a trend that many cultural critics have decried -- what Russell Jacoby called the "professionalization and academization" of public intellectuals. In fact, the growth of the blogosphere breaks down -- or at least erodes -- the barriers erected by a professionalized academy.

Most of the obituaries for the public intellectual suffer from the cognitive bias and conceptual fuzziness that come from comparing the annals of history to the present day......

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....The proliferation of blogs reverses those trends in several ways. Blogs have facilitated the rise of a new class of nonacademic intellectuals. Writing a successful blog has provided a launching pad for aspiring writers to obtain jobs from general-interest magazines. The premier general-interest magazines and journals in the country either sponsor individual bloggers or have developed their own in-house blogs.

For academics aspiring to be public intellectuals, blogs allow networks to develop that cross the disciplinary and hierarchical strictures of academe. Provided one can write jargon-free prose, a blog can attract readers from all walks of life -- including, most importantly, people beyond the ivory tower. (The distribution of traffic and links in the blogosphere is highly skewed, and academics and magazine writers make up a fair number of the most popular bloggers.) Indeed, because of the informal and accessible nature of the blog format, citizens will tend to view academic bloggers that they encounter online as more accessible than would be the case in a face-to-face interaction, increasing the likelihood of a fruitful exchange of views about culture, criticism, and politics with individuals whom academics might not otherwise meet. Furthermore, as a longtime blogger, I can attest that such interactions permit one to play with ideas in a way that is ill suited for more-academic publishing venues. A blog functions like an intellectual fishing net, catching and preserving the embryonic ideas that merit further time and effort.

Perhaps the most-useful function of bloggers, however, is when they engage in the quality control of other public intellectuals. Posner believes that public intellectuals are in decline because there is no market discipline for poor quality. Even if public intellectuals royally screw up, he argues, the mass public is sufficiently uninterested and disengaged for it not to matter. Bloggers are changing that dynamic, however. If Michael Ignatieff, Paul Krugman, or William Kristol pen substandard essays, blogs have and will provide a wide spectrum of critical feedback....."

Robert Cottrell: Isaiah, chapter 100:

.......The term "public intellectual" gained currency 20 years ago, describing a writer or academic who commanded public notice, especially when accepted as an authority in many fields. There was nothing new about such "brand-extension" in the humanities. Like Plato, Goethe or Berlin, writers and philosophers had long drifted in and out of public view, holding forth on life in general. But when nuclear weapons, environmentalism and genetics began to perturb Western public opinion in the 1960s, so more scientists followed Albert Einstein out of the academy and into the public arena. Richard Feynman, James Watson and Jacob Bronowski produced bestselling books without diluting their reputations. Freeman Dyson and Steven Weinberg wrote regularly for the New York Review of Books. Noam Chomsky's left-wing politics eclipsed his scholarly work in linguistics..........

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......But the rise of blogs has greatly enlarged and confused the market. A disparager would say that anybody can be a blogger, and anything can be a blog: is this not proof of low standards? And yet, top bloggers include academics and commentators whose work would qualify them as public intellectuals by any traditional measure--for example, Tyler Cowen, Daniel Drezner, James Fallows, Steven Levitt, Lawrence Lessig and Andrew Sullivan. Indeed, it seems fair to say that if you have the quick wit and the pithy turn of phrase traditionally needed to succeed as a public intellectual, then you are one of nature's bloggers. If you cannot quite imagine Berlin posting to Twitter, then think how well he would put, say, Hannah Arendt in her place, on bloggingheads.tv......

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....Whatever their provenance, the public intellectuals of 2009 will want to be fluent in the obvious issues of the moment: environment and energy, market turmoil, China, Russia, Islam. On that basis it looks like another good year for established stars such as Thomas Friedman, Martin Wolf, Bjorn Lomborg and Minxin Pei. But a rising generation of bloggers is terrifyingly young and bright: expect to hear more from Ezra Klein, Megan McArdle, Will Wilkinson and Matthew Yglesias.

Daniel Drezner: Trapped in a recursive loop on public intellectuals:

Of course, the really funny thing about this is that Klein, McArdle, Wilkinson and Yglesias all dwarf my traffic flows.