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”).

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.”