If an intellectual requires an audience in order to be an intellectual, then blogging has provided more people than ever with an opportunity to be intellectuals.
17 responses to “Intellectuals”
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Absolutely!
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But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Blogging consumes time and, as a medium, is not well-suited to profound contributions. Surely, those who have established reputations are able to reach out to a wider audience through more popular contributions. But it is unlikely that any one will acquire a reputation as an intellectual through blogging.
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Unlikely but possible.
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I wholeheartedly agree, even though the Internet and Google should have wiped out much of the ignorance and stupidity that continues to plague the world that we inhabit. Do you think I’m an actual intellectual? I feel that I’ve come a long way in my way of thinking and not falling prey into blind dogma.
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“Do you think I’m an actual intellectual?”
– Without a doubt. Thinking for yourself is the most crucial characteristic.
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It has sure given you the opportunity to pose as one…
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And today is Monday. Any more trivialities to share?
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Come on Jim, she does have the most crucial characteristic.
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What is ” the most crucial characteristic”?
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Thinking for yourself. To the extent that the blogosphere creates echo chambers, it would have to be classified as anti-intellectual.
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Before the Internet, intellectuals had to rely on the publishers of newspapers, magazines and books to give them a chance to speak out. That was hardly a freer medium.
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It’s very important to find the central points from which ideas are being disseminated, if one wants to have a chance to change the direction of their flow.
I admit to having found a very key one, but I also admit to being entirely flummoxed at to how to come up with any effective answer or solution.
YouTube is currently more important, I think, than blogs, because it gives people information in a form they find easily digestible. It is easier for illiterate people to listen and view something than it is for them to read something.
It is very important to have a look at the current anti-feminist gibberish put out on YouTube, because otherwise one has not idea whence the strange ideas and false ‘truisms’ emerge.
To update those who may not know, currently there is strong consensus in the minds of the illiterate that “feminism is an ideology of hate”. The echo chambers resonates this notion quite strongly. If one believes that anything is “an ideology of hate”, one feels justified in condemning anything that so much mentions the word, “feminism”.
There are other “truisms” floating around that have a psychological ring of truth, but are actually at best half-truths, and certainly misrepresent feminists and intellectuals and others.
Believe me, tens of thousands of people are finds their drug from something other than Fox News.
It makes me despair of America. But if something is broken that isn’t mine, I don’t feel any responsibility to fix it.
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“YouTube is currently more important, I think, than blogs, because it gives people information in a form they find easily digestible. It is easier for illiterate people to listen and view something than it is for them to read something.”
– I think you are absolutely right but I’m so much more verbal than visual that I could barely make myself watch a 7-minute clip I needed for my own class today.
“It is very important to have a look at the current anti-feminist gibberish put out on YouTube, because otherwise one has not idea whence the strange ideas and false ‘truisms’ emerge.”
– As I was searching for that clip I needed (the footage of Spanish Civil War), YouTube kept recomemnding weird anti-feminist screeches. So I think you are right.
“To update those who may not know, currently there is strong consensus in the minds of the illiterate that “feminism is an ideology of hate”.”
– You are totally scaring me because the top recommendation from YouTube was called exactly that. Does YouTube recommend it to everybody? I didn’t watch it because my blood pressure is up as it is today.
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It could be that there is some algorithm at work that recommends things to people who share a network in other respects. The most hopeful possibility is that because I viewed that stuff, they were trying to palm it off onto you as well. But I think they really are pushing that kind of stuff. I think, also, that The Last Psychiatrist may have got his idea about how women would be liberated if only they could stop wearing lipstick from a similar YouTube fracas. A lot of MRAs were complaining that a particular woman had used YouTube to make a lot of money by presenting her pretty face whilst arguing against the hyped up sexualisation of gaming avatars. On its surface, it looks hypocritical, but that is because life is always way more complicated that it seems on the surface.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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