digital intellectual, @superwuster

Whether you like it or not, this era is written in pixels on a screen shuttled through wireless waves and cables of ethernet. We no longer carve glyphs into stone, dip quills into inkwells, or set a typeface on the press. Like that, the digital intellectual doesn’t stand on a physical soapbox but speaks on top of accumulated social media reputation, delivering content through the shifting protocols and applications that govern the attention of our democracy. In the mirthful video above, you’ve met Columbia law professor Tim Wu while he explains net neutrality to Stephen Colbert on a rollercoaster. To the online generation, no public intellectual has done more to elucidate the nature and exploitation of mass attention by governments and corporations. To governments and corporations, his towering intellect is welcomed for uniquely invaluable legal and moral advice. Among his academic peers, his work is a crucial component for any serious frameworks of the current cyberwar, media dynamics, and technological innovation — his seminal paper receiving tens of thousands of downloads and hundreds of thousands of views.. Tim Wu encourages 21st century content creators to be respectful, transparent, and efficient with their audience’s time, so I’ll be up front with what you’re gonna get in this essay.

1. The inception of net neutrality
2. Aspects of the modern public intellectual, something I’m going to call the digital intellectual.
3. How Wu’s polymathic writings, versatile speaking, and social media strategy is influenced by his academic background.
4. The role of the academic as a digital citizen

Among those aged 18-49, about half of Americans get their news online. About a sixth of Americans have a Netflix subscription, a quarter have an Amazon Prime subscription, and almost all online adults have a Facebook account. Our mass media has transitioned from the homogenous infrastructure of TV to the heterogeneous infrastructure of the internet, with new locuses of control, new actors, and new predicaments. While the clarity and structure of this political and corporate landscape is still contested, it is clear that the owners of the infrastructure (Internet Service Providers) that connect users to resources command inordinate power. It was with this intuition, that, in 2003, five years before the iPhone and the mobile web, and nine years before Facebook’s IPO, Wu published a prescient paper titled “Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination.” I’ve included the abstract below.

Communications regulators over the next decade will spend increasing time on conflicts between the private interests of broadband providers and the public’s interest in a competitive innovation environment centered on the Internet. As the policy questions this conflict raises are basic to communications policy, they are likely to reappear in many different forms. So far, the first major appearance has come in the ‘‘open access’’ (or ‘‘multiple access’’) debate, over the desirability of allowing vertical integration between Internet Service Providers and cable operators. Proponents of open access see it as a structural remedy to guard against an erosion of the ‘‘neutrality’’ of the network as between competing content and applications. Critics, meanwhile, have taken open-access regulation as unnecessary and likely to slow the pace of broadband deployment.

This paper has had an explosive role in academics, government policy, and corporate warfare. It’s merit was that it coined a term for the idea that ISPs should not control the type of content that passes through their infrastructure – “net neutrality.” In the same way that the government provides enormous freedom in how you use the road – Wu argues that communications regulators should keep the internet a competitive marketplace, and that anyone should have the freedom to deliver content and services through the internet. ISPs can curtail your freedom by restricting the types of content that load quickly on your computer, or prevent your content from reaching other users. The essay won’t be about the complexity and mechanics of this, but the open source tech hippies of the internet have done great job of explaining the atrocities of ISPs and major concepts in internet freedom on Wikipedia. This paper will be about how Tim Wu, as a public intellectual, is able to effectively take his legal expertise and beliefs about personal freedom to his fellow citizens in myriad ways.

In a previous era, a public intellectual could effectively communicate his message by appearing on TV, penning op-eds for major newspapers, and writing a few popular books. In today’s digital world, the competition for attention is fiercer, requiring a multi-faceted approach including numerous streamed speaking engagements and a robust social media strategy to boost the likelihood that a user happens upon your content. Early in Wu’s career, he wrote a book review of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail on which he writes “uncovers a phenomenon that’s undeniably going on and makes clear sense of it”. Anderson puts a succinct summary of the concept on the book’s website:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

The author argues that this has several ramifications, two of which are pertinent for understanding the nature of effective media. First “successful aggregators have to have both hits *and* niches”, meaning that a few pieces must have widespread reach, but there must be a large quantity of less popular pieces that appeal to niche communities. Second, it is indicative of our transition from mass culture to fragmented market segments that require individualized content.

In order to perform a duty as a public intellectual to inform the populace, an academic is tasked with not only targeting the mainstream, but identifying and reaching smaller segmented communities. In the digital world, these communities vary in media consumption habits, social media circles, demographic, and influence. The academic must create a robust strategy in reaching as many of these communities as possible in order to maximize influence. This 21st century duty is an aspect of the public intellectual that I would call a digital intellectual.

Wu is adept at this, maintaining a diverse profile of writing on culture, design, style, and philosophy. His writings for Slate, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times encompass erudite essays and analyses of various seriousness, from extolling fiction, to the effects of technology on interior design. In filtering algorithms for feeds like Facebook and Twitter, this polymathic approach gives his posts an enormous reach, cross pollinating between enclaves of readers. His sincere love of writing on all topics comes clear on his website, crediting Lawrence Lessig and Richard Posner (among many others) as teachers who influenced his style and avarice for crafting prose.

However, our government is far from a direct democracy; Americans submit to a rule by corporate conglomerates. Just how ISPs exert enormous power over us, tech giants such as Google and Facebook also act as gatekeepers of media and stewards of the political landscape. Google is known for putting enormous amounts of money in Wu’s academic field in order to align academic and political interests with their own. While Wu isn’t scared of career repercussions of critiquing these giants, he also maintains a great working relationship with these companies, appealing to the people working within them, providing legal advice, and avoiding direct antagonization. In the following video, Wu introduces his book The Attention Merchants to Google employees. While the book ultimately cautions against the types of attention aggregation that Google uses as its core revenue source, watch how he is able to introduce himself as an ally and familiar friend of the company:

A Chomskyan view of democracy would hold that its effectiveness is related to an informed public. The role and history of the American public intellectual is captured neatly in a blog post by USC professor of writing Stephen Mack. I’ve included a quote from it below:

Trained to it or not, all participants in self-government are duty-bound to prod, poke, and pester the powerful institutions that would shape their lives. And so if public intellectuals have any role to play in a democracy—and they do—it’s simply to keep the pot boiling. The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.

In today’s digital landscape of media, the public intellectual needs to fight strategically and be vigilant in constantly putting out diverse forms of content. I think Wu is stellar example of an academic who works to keep digital politics in the ears of informed citizens amidst a stark transition from the mass media of the previous decades.