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

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

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.

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... See more

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.

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.

to live an “entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a truly human life,” by which she meant that one is “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary... 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.