Paul Jouhaud

…own us makes the role of pubic intellectual a challenging one. Marshall McLuhan famously once said “When you give people too much information, they resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience.” McLuhan was, of course, talking about what happens when people are overloaded with information. Th…

A public intellectual is someone whose opinions help to set the moral and aesthetic standards of her time; she draws fault lines, explains the stakes of present-day conflicts, interrogates collective intuitions. But more specifically — and more strangely — a public intellectual is someone who articulates alliances between seemingly disparate cultural and political opinions.

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.” — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves