Information is cheap. Simply knowing facts does not make you important or interesting. I can find any facts I am interested in by exploring a careful cross-section of Wikipedia and Google. If need be, I can always post on a newsgroup or email an expert. Deep investigation is the realm of the experts with whom I can speak at a whim. No, the true commodity of value is curiosity. Unlike previous ages, simply wanting to know is a bulk of the work for your layman. The rest is an ability to sift through facts to arrive nearer to truth - whatever it may mean. This, I believe, is the essence of the new intellectual.
The ability to understand and wade through a given zeitgeist is an important aspect of intellectuals in any age. Context is now the larger barrier to knowledge, and even that barrier is not overly high. We have become inadvertent experts at information trading, distillation, and dissemination. Our great battle isn't to be waged over knowledge, but truth. How do we know what we see and hear is factual? How do we know the difference, and ensure that others aren't taken in by it? Ridicule is our weapon of choice. Intense social pressure is the mechanism by which we manage. It may sound cruel, but the ideas that survive the swamp are quite often the fittest. This is the culture we make and in which we live.
But first, you cannot ignore history. I'm interested in investigating the similarities and differences of we, the neo intelligentsia; but before that, I cannot ignore how we arrived here. Considering my locale, growing up in the latter part of the 20th century mid-America, the history I know is that of a generation raised by commercials, electronics, relative peace and prosperity, and surrounded by the thrashings of a generation who refused to own their own failures: the Baby Boomers, and their sour progeny: Generation X. Though I have little interest in exploring facts of this history, and my preferred focus is that of now, having no knowledge of your immediate history is wantonly ignorant. As I said above: context is the barrier to knowledge, and you cannot hope to have context without knowing the previous state of things.
