The debate - are bloggers public intellectuals?
Ok, this is only very vaguely related to IP law - but hey, I'm into IT law and that shades into free speech and 'web community' type issues. Margo Kingston's been making comments, and Greg Sauer-Thompson has a long piece on it; Ken Parish notes his own appearance in Margo's Radio National thing, as did John Quiggin of course.
First point: surely, only a limited number of blogs can lay any claim to such 'intellectualism' at all. When this kind of debate gets started, it's notable that we're ignoring a helluva lot of blogs out there - many of which are totally uninteresting rantings by people who really should be out enjoying the beach or something.
Second point: I agree that blogs by people like Quiggin and Parish, and many others in the Australian blogsphere, are contributing some really interesting stuff out there. And no doubt there is a whole group of people who do read this stuff. But it is a limited group still. Not that that's a problem - hey, no one ever said that the whole of the community had to be fully engaged in politics and public debate all the time. Different ways of engaging for different people, right? Blogging ain't the answer. It's specialist. Good for some not for others.
Third, are the public intellectuals missing? As someone working at a university, I know that people angst about this all the time. Should academics be out there commenting more? Probably. But there's a bit of a strange relationship between the media and the academy. Much of the time they don't seem to understand each other that much. There's definitely a debate that goes on, too, whenever someone comments "outside their field of specialisation". Sometimes it seems like the only ones "allowed" to do that are the journalists (well acknowledged all-rounders).
Dunlop's comments on "intellectual practice put the onus on academics to educate for citizenship, but don't answer the question - should we be out there, pushing ourselves or our agendas or our views more? I guess the beginning of an answer is that for some, that's exactly what they like doing. For others, intellectual practice is different - more introverted or specialist or whatever. The good thing is there are plenty of opinionated people in the universities, and many of them are great at not shutting up.
Thank god for loud-mouths.