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.

Here’s one way to frame our situation with regards to information, knowledge, and the public sphere in three stages: 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... See more

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.”

especially after the advent of electronic media, knowledge, place, and the public sphere begin to diverge. While local realities still loomed large epistemically and politically, there was a drift toward more abstract knowledge and more abstract communities (some might say “imagined communities”).

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

... See more

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.

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.