Obvious self-promotion feels tawdry. This is especially true in the age of social media, when constantly marketing ourselves (to whom, exactly?) has become so easy, addictive and sophisticated. 

This is what makes the concept of a public intellectual contradictory. Too many TV and radio appearances; the churning pressure of a weekly column (bound to consist, partly, of mundane meditations); tweeting too much or in a way that tries too hard to be funny; going on a comedy quiz show. All of these things risk denigrating the standing of an intellectual and transforming them, in the public imagination, into the sort of person whose career has “pop” as its prefix. It’s a delicate balance to strike.

There has been a lot written about the decline of the public intellectual. But these pieces often operate from a false premise, comparing the standing of, say, an esteemed academic philosopher at Oxford in our era, to the reputation of John Berger in the 1960s. So, how can a specialist become well-known to the general public without seeming unserious?

The issue is not that a fidgety public has suddenly started ignoring a type of figure they used to revere, but that academic philosophy is not as resonant to contemporary concerns as Berger’s work was at the time. Berger was not an academic, however, but a figure whose work became popular for rigorously addressing the aesthetic and technological concerns of his era. 

When I consider what a truly modern public intellectual might look like, I think not of historians or philosophers but of the internet. And then of a man named Evgeny Morozov, whose work blogging about the social implications of technology and surveillance led to him earning a PhD from Harvard, and to write regularly for places like The Guardian and The New York Times about privacy, data collection and Silicon Valley in a funny, engaging way. 

Self-promotion works best when it is subtle and serendipitous; when your audience feels almost as if they have stumbled upon someone who was not seeking to be discovered.