The question that comes to mind is what do I, the academic, have to contribute to the public's understanding of the local music scene? I can talk about set theory and Schenker with the best of them, but that doesn't help John and Sue decide what to do with their Friday night.
While all of this is happening, two items crossed my desk. One, from CHE titled "The New Economy of Letters". Jill Lepore, the author, points out that "more scholars are writing more words for less money than ever before." She writes that widespread disappearance of bookstores and tightening belts at university presses are contributing to the disappearance.
There have been plenty of laments of the decline in public intellectuals; this is not new. I have quite a few friends in academia who, I think, would love to be considered public intellectuals, to share their research with the broader public. I also have plenty of colleagues who are more than happy to live in their ivory tower and do things that probably a dozen people will a) read and b) understand. Lepore argues that "This set of arrangements has produced a great, heaping mountain of exquisite knowledge surrounded by a vast moat of dreadful prose." So it sounds like writing may be (a big) part of the problem.
Enter this helpful tip sheet, in which Alane Salierno Mason, an editor at W.W. Norton, offers some advice on converting academic-ese into something that somebody a) can understand and b) might want to read. My summary (which may take some liberties) is that academics care about and, thus, write about ideas. Everyday folks care about people, and want to read about people.
There's another part of this "where are the public intellectuals?"/"why won't anybody read my writing?" that is being overlooked, and that is the growing disdain toward experts in general. The internet and mobile technologies have given just about everyone instantaneous access to vast amounts of knowledge. For example, I learned all about "shoegaze" music today, and the first resource that popped up when I Googled it was Wikipedia: a giant clearinghouse of "knowledge" "curated" by God-knows-who. I've written about this previously here, if you're interested. In that earlier post (and my subsequent thinking about the topic), the goal then becomes teaching people to be critical thinkers. That doesn't necessarily solve this problem, though: put another way, I don't see anyone buying a book or magazine with the title "How to critically evaluate stuff on the internet" or "Go to a library" by A. Public Intellectual.
I'll stop there, I think.