From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities

Digital media has made it possible to live an even more intensely private life, inhabiting what Renee DiResta once called “bespoke realities.”

We perceive a common world and thus cultivate a common sense, or a sense of the world we have in common.

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.

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.

for better and for worse, the multiplicity and scale of digital media effectively brought the age of consensus to an end, it did not return us to an age of common sense.

1. Pre-modern information environments were locally shared common worlds mediated chiefly by our embodied experience.


2. Modernity offered instead a de-situated public sphere built on a shared institutional and expert knowledge mediated by print and mass media.


3. What we are now living through is the collapse of the modern arrangement and the emergence of

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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.

in a democratic context, the knowledge presumed of the informed citizen expands in scope and detail, and it is often wholly divorced from their everyday experience.