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.”

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 media... See more

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.