The Gutenberg Parenthesis: the Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet by Jeff Jarvis

Author:Jeff Jarvis [Jarvis, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501394843
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

“Republics require conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should be noisy places.”75 So said the late Columbia Professor James Carey, a scholar of communication as culture. Carey understood, better than anyone I have read, the primacy of conversation in our conception of the public and of the role of the press in it. He informs my thinking about what kind of conversation we should strive for in this time of the universal press.

As he formulated his own theories, Carey synthesized the thought of early scholars in communications, Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. In his classic 1922 work Public Opinion, Lippmann complained—as we do today—that the news comes at us too fast. He insisted that the public is incapable of gaining sufficient knowledge and expertise to make informed decisions. When he was being generous, he said the “omnicompetent citizen” is an impossibility because “the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.” When he was less charitable, Lippmann averred that “the mass of absolutely illiterate, of feeble-minded, grossly neurotic, undernourished and frustrated individuals, is very considerable.”76 The industry meant to inform the public, the press, is fundamentally flawed. “The press is no substitute for institutions,” said Lippmann. “It is like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision. Men cannot do the work of the world by this light alone. They cannot govern society by episodes, incidents, and eruptions.” True. As Lippmann said, “newspapers necessarily and inevitably reflect, and therefore, in greater or lesser measure, intensify the defective organization of public opinion.”

Lippmann put his faith instead in experts, proposing a priesthood of panels populated by scientists and others who would inform not the public but instead their elected officials and administrative leaders. Lippmann thus segregated information and expertise from politics and public opinion, contending that “the power of the expert depends upon separating himself from those who make the decisions, upon not caring in his expert self, what decision is made.” His vision is especially difficult to imagine now, in a time of resistance to expertise and institutions. And one must ask: Expert in what? Who is expert in racism and inequality but those who are burdened with the consequences? Who is expert in disability but those who live with its boundaries? Are the experts in police violence the police or the objects of it?

Dewey countered Lippmann: “No government by experts in which the masses do not have the chance to inform the experts as to their needs can be anything but an oligarchy managed in the interests of the few.” A society in which the public is mute save for the ballot box must be one in which considerable resources are spent on manipulating voters via propaganda. Administration by experts rather than political cronies seems a worthy goal. But, Dewey said, “this revival of the Platonic notion that philosophers should be kings is the more taking because the idea of experts is

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