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blogging and the digerati
This page looks at blogging, the digerati and public intellectuals.
It covers -
a
reality test?
Nicholas Lemann observed in 2004 that
one
reason that "the press" and "the media"
have become synonyms for journalism is that we've given
journalists what we think is a critical task: amassing,
digesting, and getting across important material that
isn't readily accessible to ordinary citizens. Journalists
have an invisible passe-partout that allows them to
roam the world and ask consequential people impertinent
questions.
For
us it is unclear whether 'consequential people' yet feel
under much pressure to answer the questions or even recognise
the existence of the blogosphere.
digerati, public intellectuals and politics
Some enthusiasts have been quick to conflate blogging,
the digerati, public intellectuals and substantive political/cultural
change.
Terry Eagleton suggested in 2004 that
the
spooky music of Mastermind says it all. Intellectuals
are weird, creepy creatures, akin to aliens in their
clinical detachment from the everyday human world. Yet
you can also see them as just the opposite. If they
are feared as sinisterly cerebral, they are also pitied
as bumbling figures who wear their underpants back to
front, harmless eccentrics who know the value of everything
and the price of nothing. Alternatively, you can reject
both viewpoints and see intellectuals as neither dispassionate
nor ineffectual, denouncing them instead as the kind
of dangerously partisan ideologues who were responsible
for the French and Bolshevik revolutions. Their problem
is fanaticism, not frigidity. Whichever way they turn,
the intelligentsia get it in the neck.
Can
the public variety be rescued through blogging? Tim Dunlap's
2003 Evatt Foundation If you build it they will come:
Blogging and the new citizenship asked
"is blogging really the new public intellectual rock
'n' roll".
For us that is an apt image, given that the best part
of many blogs - like many rock groups - is the funky name
rather than what you read, hear or smell.
Dunlap praised blogging as
the
home of a new type of public intellectual, a type that
breaks down the usual images of the detached wise person
or topical expert explaining things to an uninformed
public ... blogging brings public debate back within
coo-ee of those to whom it should belong anyway, the
ordinary citizens. Blogging, potentially on a large
scale, puts the public in public intellectual.
We
are not fans of Richard Posner's rather zany Public
Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge: Harvard
Uni Press 2002) - an idiosyncratic catalogue of the great
& good ... or merely windy & soundbite-wise. We
are therefore inclined to say, with apologies to Monty
Python, that although the net makes a bully pulpit the
blogger as public intellectual isn't the Messiah, "he's
just a naughty boy".
Dunlap argues that
blogs
are necessarily sycophantic. Being run largely by people
without the resources of a media agency with which to
do original research, they are merely reactive to the
news of the day as published by major outlets. ...
As I say, the lone blogger's resources are limited,
but experience shows that they tend to make good use
of those they have. Chief amongst these is the search
engine Google which is to blogging what the Otis elevator
was to skyscrapers: not just a way of getting around
but the very thing that made the structure feasible
in the first place. ...
blogs are politically engaged, not artificially detached.
Few bloggers try for "objectivity" in the
traditional journalistic sense and most are happy to
declare openly their political allegiance. This is both
a strength and a weakness, as we will see, but ultimately
it is the nature of the beast and nothing to get upset
about. In fact, it goes to the heart of my understanding
of bloggers as the new public intellectuals.
Although
history and works such as Mark Lilla's The Reckless
Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: NY Review
Books 2001), Frank Furedi's Where Have All the Intellectuals
Gone? (London: Continuum 2004) and Russell Jacoby's
The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age
of Academe (New York: Basic 1987) suggest that public
intellectuals such as Sartre are perhaps best kept off
the streets, we wonder whether the energy going into writing
(and even reading) some political blogs might be more
usefully employed in civic engagement of a less virtual
kind.
As we have suggested in discussing online politics, it
is difficult to respect a commitment that does not extend
beyond a mouse-click. Has blogging become a substitute
rather than a means of engagement?
Ken Parish's 2003 Monitorial cyber-citizens? The new
fire alarms paper,
in noting the adversarial nature of much blogging, more
broadly questioned some assumptions about civic discourse,
leadership and the net. The 2004 The Power and Politics
of Blogs (PDF)
by Daniel Drezner & Henry Farrell offered other perspectives.
The US Chronicle of Higher Education quoted
University of Chicago academic Jacob Levy as commenting
that
I'm worried about public-intellectualitis - the well-known
tendency for professors with real expertise in one field
to pose as experts in many others, the pose of authority
that comes with academics' comments on issues of the
day
but
consoling the academy that there is little tendency to
fall into "the scholarly sound bite - the public
career built on offering quick juicy quotes to the press."
Bites - sound or otherwise - are explored in The Ideas
Market (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 2004) edited
by David Carter, an examination of Australian public intellectuals
and their reception.
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