Critique and the deliberate professional: Framing the new and enhanced role of intermediaries in digital culture

Abstract

The ‘new spirit of capitalism’ has profoundly transformed the realms of education and culture, while also altering what it means today to be reflexive, and critical more broadly. New problems and constraints have risen, yet new avenues of engagement with cultural content—via Web-based technologies especially—have risen too. The first section of this chapter is dedicated to the new digital ecology where participation and critique are linked to important changes in the nature of cultural gatekeeping. Entrenched intellectuals and intermediaries are currently redefining cultural legitimacy and connoisseurship by crafting a more horizontal, deliberative and thus somewhat democratic public sphere. All of those positive developments should not lead, however, to a blind faith in digital technology. In the second section, it is argued that there is a role for deliberate professionals to participate in the critique of technological infrastructures. There is also a role for them to critique how the organisation and circulation of cultural content, impart visibility to what is too often inscrutable or unaccountable, and question —inside as much as outside universities— how social media platforms create a ‘new normal’.