From Common Sense to Bespoke Realities

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.”

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.

The age of the mass media spectacle prepared us for the age of the participatory spectacle that was social media. The loneliness of mass society drove us to embrace the promise of ubiquitous connection. The valorization of information led us to indiscriminately embrace the disorienting conditions of information superabundance.

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

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.”

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

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.

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.