The Interactive Intellectual. Bas Heijne on Twitter

Samenvatting

In this article the delicate balance between accessibility and complexity that public intellectuals face is addressed. Considering this balance, it is remarkable that some public intellectuals use a medium like Twitter, which can be very public but at the same time restricts its users to a maximum of 140 characters per message. How can this medium be useful to spread intellectual ideas? To investigate this, we look at the Twitter activity of the Dutch public intellectual Bas Heijne. Three distinct categories of Twitter usage are proposed and applied to analyze Heijne’s use of Twitter: promotion, communicative interactivity and informative interactivity.