How many intellectuals do you have among your acquaintances? In fact, when was the last time you met someone who calls himself/herself an intellectual? or even heard someone being mentioned on TV or in a newspaper as an "intellectual"?

If you do a google search on "a first class intellectual" "a great intellectual" "a ... intellectual"..., you will only get a small number of returns, and they mostly use "intellectual" as adjective, not noun. If you search for "intellectual experience", "intellectual contribution" or "intellectual framework", you get about 100,000 hits, but if you search for "intellectual property"...hehheh...try it and see for yourself. It shows there is a lot of money in intellectual property, some in intellectual framework/experience/contribution, but none in being an "intellectual". However, searching with "intellectuals" produces 27 million hits; now why do intellectuals exist and are regarded as important collectively, but virtually nobody wants to be an individual intellectual? If you look into the items about "intellectuals", you can see that these are really about "highly educated people" rather than "intellectuals", a community that used to be called "the intellegentsia". "Intellectuals", therefore, does not necessarily mean a group of individuals who is each an intellectual.

Someone used being mentioned in media often as the criterion to rank the prominence of various "public intellectuals"

Henry Kissinger (12,570 media mentions between 1995 and 2000)
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (12,344)
George Will (10,425)
Lawrence Summers (9,369)
William J. Bennett (9,070)

Robert Reich (8,795)
Sidney Blumenthal (8,044)
Arthur Miller—the law professor, not the playwright—(7,955)
Salman Rushdie (7,688)
William Safire (6,408)

That article's author then wondered how the rankings might change if we included citations in books—or rather, books sold by Amazon despite them being admittedly incomplete inventory. Further, he weeded out those intellectuals who were known mainly for working in government, on the theory that these folks were usually quoted not because of their intellectual contributions but more because of their proximity to power. Here's the revised Posner media-citations list (note: there might be an editorial error, since adding book citations ought to change the counts for people who appear on both lists):

George Will (10,425 media mentions between 1995 and 2000)
Arthur Miller—the law professor, not the playwright—(7,955)
Salman Rushdie (7,688)
William Safire (6,408) (Note: Safire's fame as a Nixon speechwriter got him his New York Times column three decades ago, but most people today know him as a columnist, not as a former government official.)
George Orwell (5,818)
Alan Dershowitz (5,778)
Toni Morrison (5,633)
Tom Wolfe (5,342)
Norman Mailer (4,860)
George Bernard Shaw (4,835)

These people make/made a living as authors, newspaper columnists, university academics and government officials. They all pump out a large amount of writing and speeches, but did any of these people called himself/herself an "intellectual"? (Notice there is only one woman among the two lots.) If the most prominent members of this vague collection of "intellectuals" producing 27 million google hits do not call themselves intellectuals, then what does this group actually contain? If the above lists are examples of "public intellectuals", who are the private intellectuals?

So what is an intellectual? Obviously it is different from "knowledge worker", "academic", "researcher"... Our world probably has hundreds of millions of knowledge workers and tens of millions of academics/researchers. If you ask people "are you a knowledge worker?", I am sure many would answer yes. "Academic" and "researcher" are even simpler, since they have objective classifications as job openings. Try asking "are you an intellectual?" and see who answers yes without hesitation.

How many intellectuals are there in the world? Obviously very few since we dont meet such people and dont see them in the press described as such. Which figures in recent history would you regard as intellectuals? Karl Marx was presumably one, as was Albert Einstein. In my particular profession, John von Neumann and Herbert Simon probably qualify, but would any of the other Turing Award winners qualify? I wonder how many recent Nobel Prize winners would describe themselves to others as "intellectuals". Maybe there are many intellectuals around, but why are they so shy to identify themselves so?

Does the world need intellectuals? It seems to have managed very well without them. In our complex technological society, some people design processes, and others follow those processes, whether as white collar or as blue collar workers; some people manage and make decisions about various kinds of resources; others carry out those decisions; but neither groups would call themselves intellectuals. These people have a clear role in the society, which defines what input they need to provide to the system they exist in and what output they will receive. Knowdge workers, academics, researchers - they have such clearly defined roles. There is no clearly defined input-output role for this thing called an intellectual; therefore, the society does not need him/her. We need intellectual properties, but dont need intellectuals to produce them. They are produced instead by novelists, engineers, programmers, movie directors, models, artists, musicians...

But let me tell you I consider myself an intellectual; it's just that I dont make a living from being an intellectual - I make a living from being an academic. In today's world, my intellectual properties are less valuable than any pornstar's: she can charge people money to join her website in order to see her pictures and movies; can I make people pay to read my writings on computer science, ancient china, singapore politics? That to a great extent explains why being an intellectual is so unfashionable. With no socially defined role, there are also no well defined processes to identify another intellectual and share the activities associated with an intellectual's role with him/her; anyone calling himself/herself an intellectual would be pursuing the intellectual interests alone.

-------------the following article about current social behaviour no doubt captures important truth, but I believe the problem started long ago, the earliest sign being reporters going to John Lennon to ask about world peace, that they have  confidence in his views because his songs expressed human feelings, which count for more than expertise and experience  possessed by politicians, diplomas, academics; over the years, this attitude has led to a complete trivialization of all public affairs: politicians are remembered more for sex scandals than achievements, retired presidents go around the world getting paid large sums of money for photo opportunities, antics of paris hilton and britney spears driving off national and international affairs in press coverage... what Keller describes is merely a small manifestation of the general lack of interest in anything requiring mental effort

The Twitter Trap
By BILL KELLER
Published: May 18, 2011

  
Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.

I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, and I don’t think I’m a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that the Web reaches and engages a vast, global audience, that it invites participation and facilitates — up to a point — newsgathering. But before we succumb to digital idolatry, we should consider that innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves.

Joshua Foer’s engrossing best seller “Moonwalking With Einstein” recalls one colossal example of what we trade for progress. Until the 15th century, people were taught to remember vast quantities of information. Feats of memory that would today qualify you as a freak — the ability to recite entire books — were not unheard of.

Then along came the Mark Zuckerberg of his day, Johannes Gutenberg. As we became accustomed to relying on the printed page, the work of remembering gradually fell into disuse. The capacity to remember prodigiously still exists (as Foer proved by training himself to become a national memory champion), but for most of us it stays parked in the garage.

Sometimes the bargain is worthwhile; I would certainly not give up the pleasures of my library for the ability to recite “Middlemarch.” But Foer’s book reminds us that the cognitive advance of our species is not inexorable.

My father, who was trained in engineering at M.I.T. in the slide-rule era, often lamented the way the pocket calculator, for all its convenience, diminished my generation’s math skills. Many of us have discovered that navigating by G.P.S. has undermined our mastery of city streets and perhaps even impaired our innate sense of direction. Typing pretty much killed penmanship. Twitter and YouTube are nibbling away at our attention spans. And what little memory we had not already surrendered to Gutenberg we have relinquished to Google. Why remember what you can look up in seconds?

Robert Bjork, who studies memory and learning at U.C.L.A., has noticed that even very smart students, conversant in the Excel spreadsheet, don’t pick up patterns in data that would be evident if they had not let the program do so much of the work.

“Unless there is some actual problem solving and decision making, very little learning happens,” Bjork e-mailed me. “We are not recording devices.”

Foer read that Apple had hired a leading expert in heads-up display — the transparent dashboards used by pilots. He wonders whether this means that Apple is developing an iPhone that would not require the use of fingers on keyboards. Ultimately, Foer imagines, the commands would come straight from your cerebral cortex. (Apple refused to comment.)

“This is the story of the next half-century,” Foer told me, “as we become effectively cyborgs.”

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

The most obvious drawback of social media is that they are aggressive distractions. Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter. Eavesdrop on a conversation as it surges through the digital crowd, and more often than not it is reductive and redundant. Following an argument among the Twits is like listening to preschoolers quarreling: You did! Did not! Did too! Did not!

As a kind of masochistic experiment, the other day I tweeted “#TwitterMakesYouStupid. Discuss.” It produced a few flashes of wit (“Give a little credit to our public schools!”); a couple of earnestly obvious points (“Depends who you follow”); some understandable speculation that my account had been hacked by a troll; a message from my wife (“I don’t know if Twitter makes you stupid, but it’s making you late for dinner. Come home!”); and an awful lot of nyah-nyah-nyah (“Um, wrong.” “Nuh-uh!!”). Almost everyone who had anything profound to say in response to my little provocation chose to say it outside Twitter. In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.

I realize I am inviting blowback from passionate Tweeters, from aging academics who stoke their charisma by overpraising every novelty and from colleagues at The Times who are refining a social-media strategy to expand the reach of our journalism. So let me be clear that Twitter is a brilliant device — a megaphone for promotion, a seine for information, a helpful organizing tool for everything from dog-lover meet-ups to revolutions. It restores serendipity to the flow of information. Though I am not much of a Tweeter and pay little attention to my Facebook account, I love to see something I’ve written neatly bitly’d and shared around the Twittersphere, even when I know — now, for instance — that the verdict of the crowd will be hostile.

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

There is a growing library of credible digital Cassandras who have explored what new media are doing to our brains (Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, William Powers, et al.). My own anxiety is less about the cerebrum than about the soul, and is best summed up not by a neuroscientist but by a novelist. In Meg Wolitzer’s charming new tale, “The Uncoupling,” there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join.

Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

Bill Keller is the executive editor of The New York Times.