the public intellectual, part four

Wikipedia says that an intellectual is “a person who uses his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas.” This definition is then subdivided into three areas: the intellectual as a person involved in books and thought; the intellectual as a person being part of certain occupational classes; and the intellectual as a person of notable expertise in culture and the arts. The entry goes on to note that the definition of “intellectual” has meant different things depending upon time and place, indicating that “public intellectual” is a label generally applied to academics in fields related to culture, the arts, and the social sciences who speak about various issues of social or political import.

 

If you are unaware of the nature of Wikipedia, please read this explanation.

The most interesting thing about this definition is the air of faint disapproval implicit within the description of the public intellectual. Given the nature of Wikipedia, whoever created this article could have simply redefined the term to meet her own desires and prejudices. Instead, she chose to suggest that academics—and thus public intellectuals—are no freer from prejudice or better able to make judgments than the general public, while retaining the definition of “public intellectual” as necessitating a connection with academia. Thus, a person who is creating an encyclopedia article, and therefore a person whom one would expect to be a public intellectual, felt that there was a pre-existing definition for the term that she did not agree with but did not change.

This suggests that the term itself may be a loaded one, and that for “ordinary citizens” to choose the path of the public intellectual, it might be necessary to change the commonly perceived definition of the term or adopt new terminology. Currently, at least according to a publicly-edited and -created dictionary, the very existence of the “public intellectual” seems to be seen as a statement of class differentiation in and of itself.

the public intellectual, part three

The last time I bought a newspaper, I never even read the headlines on the front page. I just pulled it apart and put it down in the kitchen to help with housetraining my puppy. I have no idea when I last read a physical newspaper. The last time I thought about buying one was when I was in Elkhart, we were in the process of trying to find a car to buy, and it occurred to us that since we were already in Elkhart, maybe looking at cars then would be a good idea.

 

After very brief consideration, we scotched the plan, went home, and looked online.

 

Who wants a newspaper when you have the internet? Or, if you’re between the ages of 18 and 34—the ages where, according to Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, you don’t have much interest in newspapers—it’s more likely the internets or the intarweb or the series of tubes, because you know what the internet is and you know just how little our public officials understand it, and who doesn’t want to mock people who don’t understand the most basic things about the medium in which we live our lives? I don’t have a newspaper subscription, but I have an online subscription to the New York Times, and I skim Google News somewhere between one and fifty times a day, depending on what I see the first time.

 

Rusbridger’s speech is primarily about four things:

 

1.)  The internet is knocking traditional newspapers out of the game like Cro-Magnon man replaced the Neanderthals.

 

2.)  This is due to three things:

            A.) The comparatively cheap or even free advertising and information online;

            B.)  How much information is out there and accessible by an easy search; and

            C.)  People’s desire to find information only on topics in which they already have interest.

 

3.)  The public needs the fact-gathering and reliability of traditional newspapers, but traditional newspapers need readers even more, because readers provide money in two ways—they buy subscriptions and they provide a base to which advertisers can speak, thereby prompting purchase of advertising.

 

4.)  The best way to resolve the problem of declining circulation is to give the readers what they want, as described in item 2, which has resulted in the creation of comment forums on The Guardian’s website.

The really new things about Rusbridger’s speech is not that he is acknowledging the decline in newspaper reading; that’s par for the course. It’s that he’s not saying the decline is due to people’s apathy or unwillingness to read or stupidity. Instead, he’s suggesting that the problem is that people have ways they see as better for getting their news, and those ways also allow them to participate publicly and state their opinions about the news they’re getting. That is novel, and, I think, true.

 

Rusbridger never directly references the idea of a public intellectual, but it is there behind his words, especially after one has read Dunlop’s article on blogging as public intellectual practice. What he’s saying is, essentially, that newspaper subscriptions and reading are on the decline because they restrict the practice of public intellectualism to the professionals, and that the way to remedy this and gain readership is to open the forum to the true public.