Apparently, I’m not too young to feel nostalgia for the early Internet, but I’m also not too old to yearn for a rededication of this technology to its early promises of democracy and widespread education. Anyone with a computer and a connection could plug into a global human conversation, but with the rise of fake news, conspiracy theories, and online extremism turned terrorism, we see how terrifying that “anyone” is. The ad- and data-driven market economy of the Internet has usurped this utopia; the so-called attention economy serves more to distract and agitate than to inform us and help us live productive lives.
Increasingly, it seems that paywalls are being raised, dividing up and regulating passage through the Internet landscape. The original pitch for this article was an analysis of the genre of the academic interview, inspired by an academic interview with literary theorist and legal scholar Professor Stanley Fish in The Chronicle of Higher Education, but the article, which I had read a couple weeks prior, is now behind a paywall. For all sorts of traditional media, from the arts to journalism, new subscription services are popping up, offering a higher-quality and/or a more extensive collection of media as well as escape from the click-based economy. However, in many ways, this is a regression to an earlier economic stage, and this divide between the subscriber- and free-side of the internet reflects a revolution in the state of public intellectualism, as intellectuals can have more direct and widespread access to the public.
So, what is a public intellectual and what role do they serve? Fish is a useful example. A long-time New York Times columnist, he exemplifies the role of a public intellectual fundamentally as a communicator and explicator, and he rebukes academics whose arguments rest more on their academic prestige. In his op-ed “Professors, Stop Opining About Trump” (2016), Fish criticizes historians for invoking their academic credentials in their warnings about the violence and destruction Trump would bring to the nation. In his own writing, his academic prestige is never referenced; instead, his authority comes to play implicitly in the structure of his writing and thoroughness of his thinking.
To this end of public education, the Internet seems to be the ready tool of the public intellectual. Their work, regardless of its form, can be preserved online without decay. Text can be reread and reread many times over worldwide. Audio can be paused and rewound to make sure not a word was missed. Events can be videotaped and distributed to greatly expand the passive audience at an interview or Q&A. A scholar’s ability to communicate clearly and publicly is greatly enhanced by the Internet, making it an ideal platform for the diffusion of wisdom outside the academy.
Still, the public intellectual is not wholly a democratic figure. The public intellectual is one who dips in and out of conversation, but their ability to spread their message depends on their academic authority as well as their connections to traditional media companies. Fish has privileged access to The New York Times that gives his work priority in review and publishing over anything written by an anonymous member of the public. The public intellectual can surely accrue celebrity status, e.g. Noam Chomsky or Susan Sontag, and develop a following of their own, but one can not feasibly begin a relationship with the public without working through a traditional media company.
However, this vision of public intellectualism is changing with the possibility of free, self-publication on the Internet. Surely, there are still production costs, be it the cost of a computer or the cost of labor, but with the ability to publish widely-accessible work at such a minimal cost with the potential for virality, we reach a new dawn of digital public intellectualism in which intellectuals can build a relationship with the public through their own medium with minimal editorial input, circumventing the traditional authorities of large corporate media networks. These were the democratic and intellectual promises of the Internet.
However, this democratic promise of the Internet relies upon free and unbiased access, and this question of free access has recently been increasingly rolled back in many traditional media formats, such as newspapers. For a while, many popular newspapers offered free access to their websites, but increasingly this content has been put behind paywalls with faltering ad revenue as a reason cited for the decision.
Current subscription or donor-based business models of media are largely a relic of the twentieth century, offering a relative continuation of the relationship between public intellectuals and media companies. Through the Internet, traditional media companies have much larger international reach, but more importantly, subscription services encourage companies to concern themselves less with the minutiae of engagement and instead with the simpler picture of maximizing subscriptions. There is certainly a material difference in the way much of the media today is rented rather than owned, but this relates this business practice more to a library membership, which is concerned with accumulating an impressive collection rather than focusing solely on the acquisition of exciting literature. Altogether, subscription models spare companies the pressure to constantly attract attention measured in seconds but instead concern themselves with building a service worth paying for. This is a regressive leap away from the attention economy, and an interview with a public intellectual on an online subscription newspaper is received in many ways similar to how it was received before the Internet, albeit with much more geographically diverse readership.
However, not everyone is ready to start paying for that, and those unwilling to pay for access to exclusive content are limited to the click-based economy. Of course, there are researched educational websites that are not profit-driven, run as a public service by foundations or institutions, but those are more often the exception than the rule. For all the talk of a need for unbiased journalism, what we really need is more calls for quality, publicly-accessible work. The current threats to democracy and politics internationally–I hope–might finally spur a mass movement to reclaim the Internet for public benefit. By no stretch of the imagination will institutional- or donor-funded media become some bastion of progressive or public thought. Without a doubt, money will be shaping politics at a grand scale, but at least our media might triumph by persuasion and not enthrallment. This threat is actually mitigated with the exciting development is the crowd-funded work of creators who use free click- or watch-driven platforms but are largely supported by direct donation.
If the public intellectual of the twentieth century existed on TV and newspapers, the digital public intellectual of the twenty first lives on the free Internet, unmoored by traditional media companies. This new dawn though is chaotic and uncertain. Lacking the more traditional institutional structures of authority, credentialed public intellectuals struggle to swim to the top in a turbulent pool of scrambling swimmers. It should go without saying that the most thorough, fact-based arguments don’t always win.
Beyond that, though the virality of intellectual content on the Internet may rest in part on its academic merit, that merit is circumscribed by its ability to fit within the click-based economy. Ultimately, the fundamental platforms of the Internet are so deeply entrenched in the click-based economy; regardless of how individual content creators are funded, the Silicon Valley giants like Google and Twitter, which form the foundation of our Internet experience, function within this economy. There is a whole separate argument to be made for publicly funded services and platforms, which do not rely on ad or data revenue to run, and are not structurally biased towards the most enthralling, enraging, or simply engaging content. It is a greater sociological project to imagine what constitutes a priority search algorithm in the people’s best interest, but at least for now, we can think critically about the nature of content and access on the Internet and work towards a public Internet that serves to educate people–whether that education translates into action is another story.
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