Perhaps beyond the stage lights, a new group of younger intellectuals has taken shape. That is what one of my angrier critics, the New York-based freelancer Rick Perlstein claims. "A well-stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen" bright, talented, gutsy public intellectuals, he claims. But who are they? He doesn't say.
The Internet provides instant communication and quick access to vast resources, but has it altered the quality or content of intellectual discussions? Too many voices may cancel each other out.
Ortega y Gasset's fear almost a century ago of the "revolt of the masses" needs an update. We face a revolt of the writers. Today everyone is a blogger, but where are the readers?
On the Internet, articles, blog posts, and comments on blog posts pour forth, but who can keep up with them? And while everything is preserved (or "archived"), has anyone ever looked at last year's blogs? Rapidly produced, they are just as rapidly forgotten.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the MemeStreams thread with the longest temporal gap between recommendations, where the subsequent recommendation was created by memetic replication, not by coincidence (in which the second user had no awareness of the earlier post).
