Francesco Antonelli

F. Antonelli - R. Castrucci, Intellectuals’ Molecularisation and New Technologies in the Network Society In this essay we aim at analysing changes in the role of intellectuals in network society. After discussing how intellectuals have been a social and political élite during the first modernity, functioning as intermediaries, and enabling hierarchical and asymmetric order in industrial society, the essay analyses the main factors towards disintegration of this social order: decline of philosophy of Truth, rise of postindustrial and knowledge economy, spread of higher education, development of mass communication, and thus of new media. These processes have stimulated the emergence of new social subjectivities, namely knowledge workers, which have set in motion powerful disintermediation processes through the internet. On the one hand, the classical function of intellectuals has been partially absorbed by mass media, and on the other hand it has been superseded by a multitude of intelligence and opinion niches directly produced by citizen-consumers (intellectuals’ molecularisation). The resulting landscape consists in a strong balkanization of social and political world – particularly along generational and educational lines -, where, on one side you find a composite set of extremely fragmented intellectualities swarming through the Net (citizen-consumers), and on the other side masses of people still depending on mass media intermediation mechanisms (citizen-spectators). Key words: intellectuals, new technologies, public sphere, knowledge, long tail