Digital Renaissance for the Public Intellectual

The public intellectual today is much less limited in their potential for exposure because of the internet. An exceedingly larger amount of people now have instant access to virtually endless information – but is this good or bad for the public intellectual? Scholars and critics can publish their work instantly and at no cost, but that also means any Joe Schmoe like me can do the same. The public intellectual derives their power from information. And a noteworthy one is someone who presents new and valid information to the public that invokes a change for the better. Although the internet has been a huge contributor to the Information Age, sifting through the excess fat becomes more difficult.

As blogger Mack put it, “The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.” I’m sorry if I offend anybody, but things like TextsFromLastNight are hardly worth talking about. But it just so happens that Lev Manovich, arguably the leading scholar of new media, does say things worth talking about (and puts them online, too!). His book Language of New Media has been called “the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject,” because he “places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.” (CAA Reviews)

Manovich earned his undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology from NYU, and a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from University of Rochester. He is currently writing three new books, often publishes essays, and teaches Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. He remains involved in academia and continues to grow as a public intellectual all for the same reason – because “learning the processes of criticism and practicing them with some regularity are requisites for intellectual employment,” (blogger Mack). In his article New Media from Borges to HTML, he criticizes the United States government for not funding new media as early as many countries in Europe. Personally, I think he was forgetting that our Vice President invented the internet.



















But in all seriousness, Manovich has a very valid point. The internet and everything that goes with it are becoming larger and larger players in our global culture, meaning any country wanting a place in that culture needs to keep up. If you go to Japan, they probably already have cell phones out of Star Wars that beam hologram messages to each other. I’m not saying trendy gadgets are quantifiers for a country’s success, but we certainly shouldn’t be falling behind the curve in terms of the bigger things like digital infrastructure and education.