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The Public Intellectual in the Digital Age: A Paradigm Shift for Intellectual Discourse

Fri, November 10, 10:00 to 11:45am, Hyatt Regency Chicago, McCormick, Third Floor West Tower

Abstract

Modern communication technologies have undoubtedly had a significant impact on the ways in which we view, encounter, and interact with public intellectuals. Beyond facilitating interaction with modern scholars via social media, and beyond enabling intellectual engagement (or disengagement) in public forums such as the comments sections of digital publications, such tools and technologies have had an impact on the way we understand, “read,” and interpret expertise. A public intellectual such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, for instance, regularly disseminates information via social media, periodically re-staking his claims to authority and occasionally publicly debating with other public figures. Other scholars and scientists retweet his claims and debates as a form of citation and reference, occasionally adding deGrasse Tyson’s expertise to their own.

But what happens when students are encouraged to reconsider the tradition of intellectual inquiry in the “post-truth,” fake news era, wherein expertise may be claimed simply via assertion? One need not look very far to see the growing number of instances wherein students and intellectuals and other public figures cite and circulate misinformation or lay claims to unsubstantiated or unearned authority. In this context, does teaching and perpetuating traditional forms of scholarship and citation make sense? Or might we consider a new approach that best capitalizes on the best qualities of modern communication technologies to counter its worst?

In my talk, I examine ways in which digital writing platforms such as Google Drive and Blogger as well as social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter urge us to rethink the tradition of scholarship, inquiry, and citation. I discuss what happens, for instance, when we push students to reconsider the hyperlink as form of citation and thus move away from traditional paradigms, such as the one prescribed by the MLA handbook, for scholarly research and writing. In that context, I present a multidimensional framework for discourse and citation, a complex, metaphorical web wherein each nexus represents a network of connections, bolstering the strength of the intellectual structure and increasing the interlocutor’s credibility. To contrast, I also present an examination of poorly constructed webs that unravel with slight tugs, so to speak. Furthermore, I examine what happens when we urge students to interact with scholars by directly addressing public intellectuals on social media or by otherwise circulating ideas made by scholars who don’t have a living, public presence, and, in so doing, create a virtual web. I make a case for a redistribution of expertise as a form of currency and instead create a framework whereby the value of an idea becomes a product of a more democratic network of intellectual engagement than something explicitly codified by a traditional, hierarchical learning environment.

In the end, I present a pedagogy of dissent designed to deconstruct existing paradigms that support hegemonic traditions of intellectual engagement and attempt to replace such paradigms with new teaching models that facilitate the development of students’ interest and expertise via new and emerging forms of discourse and inquiry.

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