on mass media and the public sphere

Symposium on Public Space: Part III

In this symposium, we have largely been treating public space as physical space, as a place for face-to-face encounter with others, especially those we don’t already know. I argued in my essay on busking that public space affords the opportunity to build solidarity. Inevitably, as Tara writes about, it is also a space of conflicting purposes, at times even of chaos, which gives purpose to the rule of law.

The work of solidarity, of living toward togetherness, presupposes these challenges. Still, we feel a relief in having some space of our own for intimacy. Both public and private space allow for friendship in the broad Aristotelian sense (relationships marked by mutual good will), but friendships grounded in intimacy and knowledge of a person’s character are, as Aristotle saw, of a different kind from others.

Another kind of public space is all around us, however, even when we might seek to retreat into privacy: the public space of mass communication, facilitated by the ubiquity of digital technology in our lives. This idea, which seems so natural to us, is in fact the product of an intellectual and cultural revolution, which began with—or at least was greatly accelerated by—the printing press.

The conception of a public sphere as a rational information culture receives a stirring defense in Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay “An answer to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’”. The essay is best known for its opening definition of enlightenment as “the emergence of a person from self-incurred immaturity” and the motto “dare to know!” (Sapere aude!) that has come to be associated with the so-called ‘Age of Enlightenment’. The bulk of the essay, however, is concerned with describing the sort of political culture that allows for people to take responsibility for their own thinking.

In describing this culture, Kant performs a remarkable rhetorical inversion. Government officials, military officers, and priests at the pulpit are described by Kant as employing their reason privately, since they are required to subordinate their own thinking to the demands of their role within their respective institutions. It is the scholar at his desk – who may well also be a government official or military officer or priest when he is out and about – who is able to use his reason publicly, since he writes for the public world of readers (‘before the whole audience of the reading world’ — vor dem ganzen Publikum der Leserwelt).

I’m writing this essay from a bustling cafe in Manhattan, albeit with noise-cancelling earbuds in to shut out the general din. But even if I were writing in a private study, it is highly likely that I will never meet the majority of those who will read it. The metaphor of addressing a reading public gets its purchase from this indefiniteness, which resembles the indefiniteness and fluidity of public gatherings. But the asynchrony not only of space but also of time involved in describing the readers of any given published piece raises a natural question: can we conceive of these readers as forming a totality in the way the metaphor of a single reading public suggests?

Jan Collart, New Inventions of Modern Times [Nova Reperta], The Invention of Copper Engraving (ca. 1600), Public domain image

The pioneers of the Internet certainly thought so. One of the hallmarks of the protocols on which the Internet is built are their distributed and decentralized character. By contrast to ‘walled gardens’ – where information and access are limited by a company to its subscribers or an organization to its members – the Internet was meant to be open. Given the origins of the Internet in universities and the military, it is remarkable that there was ever a period where this ideal prevailed.

It is, in fact, almost impossible to explain to someone who grew up in the age of smartphones and social media what this time – call it the GeoCities era, after the popular and accessible web hosting service, running from the mid-90s to the mid-aughts – was like. One could certainly sell things on the Internet, as the fact that Amazon and EBay originated in this same period shows. But the Internet was not fundamentally for selling things, whether actual objects or advertisements or yourself in the form of a brand. Rather, the Internet was for communication, for expression, for meaning-making.

Utopian predictions that online connectivity could revitalize democracy have proven to be so wrong that they seem almost laughable. But it is also too quick to say that all of our worst impulses are simplify magnified by the Internet and other forms of mass media and communication. Particular choices made by the most powerful social media and digital technology companies — and their ever-richer owners and executives — have shaped the cultural and political possibilities, warping these technologies to favor an emerging oligarchic culture of deregulated capitalism and political influence-peddling.

The German social theorist Jürgen Habermas used the term ‘public sphere’ to name an ideal of rational, democratic communication that he saw exemplified by the bourgeois 18th century European culture of coffee houses, salons, and intellectual newspapers where political and religious authority could be challenged. But Habermas, in work dating back to the 1960s, notes that this ideal has broken down in modern liberal democracies, whose information environments are permeated by manipulation, both by governments and corporations, and devoted to entertainment—Habermas singles out television here—instead of rational debate.

The point of such an ideal is not to identify a specific utopian condition–past, present, or future–but to give us tools to critique our own situation. Mass media are always vulnerable to capture and control by powerful institutions and individuals, especially where communication to a wide audience is expensive or difficult. While the Internet has made communication extremely cheap and thereby reduced access barriers, it is increasingly difficult to command a single audience, even for the most powerful news organizations or businesses or political figures. The condition we find ourselves in is not unlike the one that obtained before mass communication was even technologically possible: we are each members of an array of publics, of possible audiences, but the public as such, whether conceived as a national entity or a global one, hardly exists.

Anonymous, Interior of a London Coffee House (ca. 1690–1700), Public domain image

This fractured social and intellectual context, in an era of instantaneous and ubiquitous communication, makes interactions in physical space all the more precious, as opportunities to forge a shared sense of what matters. If there is any sense to be made of advice to ‘touch grass’, it is this: there are forms of meaning-making available only in the visceral presence of tactic reality and the impingement on self that people bring about when we are face-to-face with them (the overwhelming reality that the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas raised to a metaphysical principle as ‘the Other’).

Until the pandemic lockdown in the Spring of 2020, I only thought I knew the significance of real presence. To be sure, virtual presence is certainly better than none. With delivery services and video technology, even those of us who were able to work from home were hardly alone. But the growing unreality of those weeks and months spent largely indoors helped me see how little these technologies afford when public action is needed.

At the time, I thought I understood, even prided myself on knowing, what was happening via the whirl of activity on Twitter and online news sites, in statistical reports and medical journals. But even the true scale of the disruption to daily life caused by the pandemic in New York City—let alone across the nation and the world—was hidden from me. As a result of enforced isolation, people (I include myself) substituted their narrow experience—and online speculation—for a view of how things were going in general. We are still making sense of those events now, and out of some of them sense may never be made.

One function of the public sphere is precisely to bridge the partial realities we see and experience and the larger forces—and the whole complex conjunction of things—that lie beyond such ordinary survey. The point of mass communication is neither simply to correct our provincialism nor to supply what we antecedently desire (whether in the form of information or entertainment), but to help a democratic public to know itself. Such collective self-knowledge for a group consists of an understanding of its values (both those its members share and the disagreements they have over these values), an appreciation of the range and variety of individual experiences, and the information needed to act collectively on the basis of these values and experiences.

The information environment that liberal democracy needs in order to flourish must be more than simply a Republic of Letters. In addition to gathering the resources to challenge institutional authority—Kant’s focus in ‘What is Enlightenment?’—we need fora to communicate in order to understand one another’s lives well enough to identify the real social problems that face us. For this reason, I am more inclined to John Dewey’s conception of democratic life as “conjoint communicated experience” than to the ideal of dispassionate debate over policy that Habermas envisions.

That is why, given the lack of public fora for deliberation in our information culture—and hardly any prospect for their revival, I believe that the work of building up such self-knowledge needs to start again in local communities. It will mean talking to our neighbors and co-workers, taking an active (and not simply remote or mediated) part in public life, and trying to understand for ourselves how things really are in our communities apart from any popular or politically expedient narrative.

If democratic life is threatened—and the evidence suggests to me that, in the United States at least, it really is, and not simply because of the present regime’s authoritarianism—the rescue effort will not take place in comment threads on news sites, no matter how well-argued, or in social media posts, no matter how seemingly persuasive, but rather in cafés and houses of worship, at union assemblies and protests and school board meetings, and even around our own dinner tables.