Public Intellectuals

There is some discomfiture at a list of top 100public intellectuals. My feel is that with the current flow of information and comlexity of the world, it is impossible for anybody to have an informed opinion on any matter unless one specializes and it is difficult for any one person to specialize on too many issues. There are various efforts by people like Ethan Zuckerman to channel information to some extent and there are think tanks. But according to Enrique Mendizabal at ODI blog:
"Think tanks like ODI have traded successfully for decades on creating and sharing specialised knowledge by hot-housing groups of smart people. But they may not be able to do so for much longer.

First, new communication technology is decentralising the production of knowledge. Specialist knowledge is being created worldwide in informal spaces. As a result, individual think tanks can rarely claim to have the best in-house experts on everything they work on. There are almost certainly better ideas elsewhere – if we look hard enough. The difficulty lies in finding them.

The second challenge is that new technology is also changing the way that people communicate and access knowledge. Users don’t wait for knowledge any longer. There is an increasing reliance on syndication and mash-up technologies to aggregate knowledge from a multitude of sources without ever visiting them. Users no longer just ‘take it all in’; they are selective in what they want from each source. The location in which information is accessed is closely related to how it is accessed. Social and professional networks take time to develop – even online – and the time spent accessing information in these places is proportional to the value assigned to the knowledge obtained. So think tanks do not just compete with other specialist knowledge producers, they must also compete with the knowledge spaces their audiences are creating for themselves. This is the real challenge. "
His solution is what he calls 'think nets'. The whole article is worth reading.