Friday, September 25, 2015

Blogs: intellectual public in conversation

Most ordinary people clearly prefer to write a few words on Twitter, Facetime, Instagram, Snap, etc or in the anonymous "Comments" sections of mainstream media, rather than write a nice long blog post, when it comes to taking part in the global conversation on the issues facing the world.

I am a very ordinary person, but unfortunately I tend to be far too longwinded to ever take the tweeters' approach.

I don't mean I am at the academic and public intellectual deep end of longwindedness.

I just feel I am more at the level of millions of other members of the public, all around the world, who tend to think, talk and write with somewhat of the complexity of academics and intellectuals, when it comes to discussing the issues of the day.

We blog, mostly, to each other - a thin but long web of the 'intellectual public' , woven from blog posts all over the globe.

We basically different from the media-savvy academic or traditional book-published "public intellectual" author in that we don't need to see a paycheque from a university or a publisher, before we speak up.

Some others may see this 'blockheaded' willingness to write without pay as our biggest weakness --- Samuel Johnson certainly did.

By way of contrast, I think it is our greatest strength - for we are free to speak from our heart and mind, without one eye always on our wallet, or on the opinions of a future grant committee ....

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