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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Communication studies
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The Ideas Industry - How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (Hardcover)
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The Ideas Industry - How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (Hardcover)
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The concept of the "public intellectual" has a rich and colorful
history. It began in the early twentieth century, when the new mass
media catapulted intellectuals who were able to write for the
general public to semi-stardom. The first wave included figures
like Walter Lippmann-who coined the term "stereotype" and is widely
considered the founder of media studies-and by the 1950s, public
intellectuals as a species had become a powerful and influential
force in the American cultural landscape. By the 1970s, the
standard definition of the public intellectual had solidified: a
person (often university-affiliated, but not always) able to
discuss and dispute any serious issue, typically in venues like The
New York Review of Books, and occasionally influence politics. The
traditional definition of the public intellectual remains with us,
but as Daniel W. Drezner shows in The Ideas Industry, it has been
gradually supplanted by a new model in recent years: the "thought
leader." In contrast to public intellectuals, thought leaders gain
fame as purveyors of a single big idea. Also, instead of battling
it out with intellectual combatants in the pages of The Partisan
Review, The Public Interest, and their descendants, they often work
through institutions that are closed to the public and which
release information selectively. Thought leaders and their
associated ideas tend to become brands-hedgehogs to the public
intellectual fox. They have also proven to be quite successful, as
evidenced by TED, Aspen Ideas, the Clinton Global Initiative, and
the like. Furthermore, they often align with one side of a
politically polarized debate and enjoy the support of ideologically
friendly private funders. Drezner identifies increasing inequality
as a prime mover of this shift, contending that our present-day
class of plutocrats not only wants to go back to school, it wants
to force "schools"-in the form of intellectuals with elite
affiliations-to come to them. And they have the money to make this
happen. Drezner, however, does not see the phenomenon as
necessarily negative. While there are certainly some downsides to
the contemporary ideas industry, he argues that it is very good at
broadcasting intellectual content widely and reaching large
audiences of people hungry for new thinking. Both fair-minded and
trenchant, The Ideas Industry will reshape our understanding of
contemporary public intellectual life in America and the West.
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