Did blogging kill the public intellectual?

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Alex has a great post, and not just because my course is starting this week by reading his chapter on Blogging. In Did blogging kill the public intellectual? Alex discusses Russell Jacoby’ item in Big Brains, Small Impact in the Chronicle of Higher Ed., noting “he assumes that a public intellectual inhabits the public sphere, and in this public sphere his professional life is nearly completely divided from his everyday life” while talking about how the noise of millions of bloggers has drowned the voices we should all be listening to, because they’re saying important things we should know.

I remember this debate, as I’ve said before, happening at the south by southwest in 2003, when journalists were going on about how blogs were cutting into their space. Of course blogs have ‘won’ though they didn’t actually know there was a battle, and are now entrenched in the broadcast media.

Alex’s analysis is better than mine, but there are two points I want to note, but I’ll stick with one. It is about shakespeare. As the wise and mighty Roger (my renaissance poetry prof. from the early 80s) was wont to impart, everyone wrote sonnets back then. Shakespeare (Sidney, Spenser, et al.) was just the best of them. People read sonnets was we used to watch hockey games. We played hockey, on the ice or in the street, and when we saw a professional game we could appreciate the skill because we too were players. The public poets were the best among many.

And that’s what I have to say about this supposed dichotomy between the public intellectual voice and the rest of us blogging… the public intellectual will serve that position best when everyone is speaking, and that intellectual just happens to do a better job of it than we do. Anyone can be a prophet in the desert. Do it in the crowd.

Everyone in CLD419 and CCLD419 should read this if they want to get a sense of the ongoing struggle for voice that blogs have initiated.

Ontario OLPC Users Groups

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Jason Shim and I have bought OLPCug.org for the Ontario OLPC Users Groups to serve as an umbrella for OLPC groups in the province.

YAY!