[RonPrice]

I have now written and published 100s of online pieces at 100s of internet sites. Didacticism, a general instructional or teaching tone and style, has been more acceptable in journalism's cultural pages because of the belief that arts and culture have formative and humanizing powers. But didacticism is all over cyberspace. Cyberspace is filled with all manner of stuff, of which journalistic didacticism is but one. An informative, a quasi-teaching tone, has been very prevalent among cultural reporters and critics for many a long year, indeed for centuries. It is certainly acceptable to me, and it has been part of my MO for at least a decade in cyberspace where I offer my journalistic wares by the 10s, the 100s, indeed, the 1000s, of pages.

A recent investigation into cultural reporters in several western countries showed that they believe the arts in general have teaching and healing powers, encourage ‘sensitivity’, and are a path for ‘understanding the world and the human condition’. Most of these critics & reporters see themselves as distanced from the cynicism of other realms of journalism. They ‘take on a crusading role’ and ‘construct themselves as moral saviours, guiding the public towards a better existence through the arts’. I, too, have no trouble identifying with those roles and purposes for my online journalistic writing. I leave it to readers to Google my many offerings.

The belief in the emancipatory powers of culture is the basis of a recurrent image in our emerging global culture of the intellectual as a teacher, and of the culture-journalist as educator. Some people define the intellectual as a ‘disseminator of knowledge and herald of the future’; others define the intellectual as ‘a spiritual leader to the people’. Still others say that the function of the intellectual at this time in history is to clarify and illustrate, explain and help people to attain moral values. While I, like many other Australians, have trouble accepting the role, the definition, of myself as an intellectual, learning and the cultural attainments of the mind have been part and parcel of my aspirations since my late teens and early twenties in the 1960s. This is more than half a century of my life. I have carried this attitude from the classroom where I spent that half a century, 1949 to 1999, into my online journalistic work.