From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities

Understood this way, “common sense” might better be called a “communal sense” to distinguish it from what usually comes to mind when most of us hear the phrase. Under these conditions, to know is to share a world. A world in this case is more than just the things out there. It is a community of interpretation.

Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in Space and Place: “In the past, news that reached me from afar was old news. Now, with instantaneous transmission, all news is contemporary. I live in the present, surrounded by present time, whereas not so long ago, the present where I am was an island surrounded by the pasts that deepened with distance.”

Hannah Arendt’s discussion of common sense and a common world. “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives,” she wrote in The Human Condition, “can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”

The worlds we now inhabit are digitized realms incapable by their nature and design of generating a broadly shared experience of reality.

Knowledge is not merely an accumulation of abstract bits of information, it is also, for the local community at least, a binding agent.

Mass society of the mid- to late-20th century is the apotheosis of the modern media environment. In the absence of a shared communal sense, it sustained the appearance of consensus.

If democracy consists of citizens deciding, collectively, what ought to be done, then the manner through which they persuade one another determines nearly everything that follows. And that privileges media ecology as the master political science. Some of its foremost practitioners, like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, sensed, far better than pol... See more

before the advent of electronic communication, the regulation of information was partly a function of our being bodies in place. Immediacy was structured by place rather than time.

consensus is a mid-19th century term whose etymology suggests feeling or sensing together. consensus mediated by knowledge institutions and experts supplants what Arendt called common sense.