I publish here the first chapter of my current article “The blogger as the intellectual of the network society”. Dealing with the question, what comes after the old intellectuals of the times of the mass media will be vanished from the public sphere, the article starts with a journey to the reflections of the intellectual at the end of the twentieth centruy. The whole article will feature quotes about the position and the role of the intellectual in the network society, the changing of the mass audience to the segmented audience, a analyses of the work, the life and the blog of the Austrian journalist Robert Misk, dealing with the question if he is a “blogging intellectual”. The conclusion will feature three types of blogging intellectuals.
The blogger as the intellectual of the network society
If we think of intellectuals names like Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ulrich Beck, Jürgen Habermas, Noam Chompsky, Anthony Giddens or Slavoj Žižek emerge in our minds. The problem with these people is that some of them are dead and those who are not are old. For example the average age of the persons rated in the “2012 Cicero Ranking of the 500 most important German intellectuals” is 66. But a short view on the ranking of the “100 top global thinkers” published by the “Foreign Policy” magazine shows some younger people, so maybe this is only a German problem. Anyway, reason enough to ask the question what comes after these people who have vanished from the public sphere? The first approach to this question is to figure out what means to being an intellectual.
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