This first day of the meeting on "The public, the media and politics: intellectual debate and science in the age of digital communication" was all about the public intellectual. The meeting started with two very interesting short introductory talks. The first was by Claus Leggewie, head of the organization where this event is taking place, the "Instiute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities". He talked briefly about his institute and the larger picture in which this meeting is embedded. Apparently, there are large, inter-university collaborations on the topic of new media and the sciences (including, obviously, the humanities), of which this meeting is one small component. The second was by Gudrun Gersmann, the other organizer of the meeting from the German Historical Institute Paris. She, as a historian, presented her institute and introduced the historical concept of the public intellectual.

The following panel discussion (see picture above) was kicked off by Jens Hacke, a self-professed non-user of Twitter and non-reader of blogs. Perhaps because he didn't experience himself what impact new media have on public intellectuals, he started talking about what roles intellectuals had in the recent past, before the advent of new media. After these elaborations, he emphasized that today's intellectuals face numerous problems, among which is the 'drowning out' of individual voices by the mass of other contributors. Not surprisingly, he explicitly mentioned his trust in the quality control of the old media such as newspapers. He ended his talk with the statement that he would like the other participants to convince him that indeed the old quality-control mechanisms were obsolete and replaceable with new methods.

The next panel member, Ute Daniel, introduced herself as a historian studying the way in which wars have been reported through the ages. She said she only got interested in public intellectuals as she started studying mass media in the 20^th century and their relation to politics. She described the roles of intellectuals in the enlightenment of the public as a self-perpetuating myth. As all in myths, there was a grain of truth in this one as well, such as very few, singular intellectuals which have achieved great prominence and enlightening effect. However, already in the 20^th century there were many more public intellectuals which basically had zero effect at all, other than obscuring, rather than enlightening the public. Then, as now, mass media intellectuals often just parroted intentionally leaked political information about the respective opponent, leading to a general despair with the political system. She felt that there was no big difference between then and now, especially if one takes into account the context in which the different people acted.

Stefan Münker started by saying he wouldn't take as long for his introduction as his predecessors. In contrast to Ute Daniel, he expressed his view that the new media are drastically changing our society. He cited the creation of media solely through social interaction as a milestone in societal development and a truly novel feature: the fifth force.

Mike Sandbothe explained how he experienced the beginnings of the WWW in the US and then came back to Europe trying to explain his colleagues what the internet was. Interestingly, he seemed to have faced serious opposition to using the internet, quite in contrast to my experiences in the mid-1990s. He described his work today primarily as analyzing the response of the ecosystem of mass media to the development and dominance of a new medium. He thinks there still are classic public intellectuals. He described Al Gore as an example of a new type of intellectual who not only addressed the general public, but also the less numerous but equally influential lobbyists and corporate figures. He finished with the statement that the new social media amplify societal resistivity and help to publicize the opinion of individuals.

So far, this whole 'panel discussion' didn’t really deserve that name as the panelists basically just held pre-prepared, very eloquent speeches, rather than discussing around a common topic. I really hope our panel tomorrow will be more of a discussion, because I definitely wouldn't be able to deliver such a speech (think politician).

After about an hour of these presentations, something more like a discussion commenced. The discussion took an interesting turn when the question turned up if the individual, heroic, famous intellectuals are dying out, maybe in favor of collaborative writing projects. The word "Wikipedia" was not mentioned, but I think everybody thought of it. The panel seemed to agree that the dominating individuals seemed to be largely absent today, or at least that they are less easily recognizable.

At this point, the discussion was opened to audience questions. These were too numerous to recount and I'm also realizing that blogging in English about an event that takes place in German makes it quite difficult to live-blog and still adequately follow the content. Perhaps due to the (to me) unusual way of communicating, I left the discussion with mixed feelings. It's hard to summarize the many aspects that people have touched upon and difficult to state any firm conclusions or insights I have gathered from the event so far. I'm left with a lot of differing ideas and thoughts and many open questions.

What did stick and what I was flabbergasted by was the energetic proposition put forth by Mike Sandbothe that, because the historical intellectuals broke the power of the church with reason, maybe today, in an age of, as he called it, overbearing reason and scientism, a public intellectual would be well-advised to fall back on medieval spirituality. To make the point of the purported scientism he cited the numerous public activities against homeopathy (he specifically mentioned the German weekly DER SPIEGEL, but I'm sure he was also thinking of campaigns like 10:23). I thought it was rather surprising how highly educated people like him who seem to have a keen intellect and a sharp sense of observation with regards to the social and historical workings of the world around them, sometimes have absolutely no grasp whatsoever of how the non-human world around them works. What may make his already surprising and disappointing remarks even worse is that he only brought these arguments up seemingly in defense of positions such as climate change denialism, holocaust denialism, anti-vaxers, or creationism that I raised as examples of what I see as rampant anti-intellectualism brought to public attention mainly with the help of new social media. I did not expect to meet that kind of people in a meeting like this.