....[T]he rapid development of the new media and computer technologies...have the potential to transform the very nature of the public sphere and open up new channels of communication to a proliferation of new voices. The public intellectual of today must now be much more alive to the possibilities for participating in what could become a new "cyberspace democracy"--an expanded public sphere which is less academic and less elitist, and demands the use of more accessible forms of language and discourse than those which intellectuals have become used to.

Source

Keith Bassett. 1996. Postmodernism and the crisis of the intellectual. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14:519.