Communication and the modern public

1. Depersonalization of state authority and the rise of bourgeois (Habermas) gave birth to public sphere. However, a strange thing began to happen: ‘public’ to be in the public sphere began to disappear from the public sphere. What does this fact mean? How can we solve the problem? What roles does ‘communication’ play in bringing the public back to the public sphere? Readings of this week directly or indirectly wrestle with these questions.

2. According to Dewey, modern technology and economics have created a new form of ‘large scale’ human associations that is utterly different from community associations. As a result, “there are too many publics,” (p.126) and those publics are “inchoate, amorphous” (p.125) and “disenchanted” (Lippman, p.36) so that their “sovereignty is a fiction.”(Lipmann, p.37) In addition, though they have diverse kind of communicative tools such as newspapers and magazines, those tools are not shared across different classes (Warner et.al.) so that they seem to “erect barriers to keep others out.” (Lynd and Lynd, p.70) Thus, the crucial question is how to bring an “organized, articulate Public” (Dewey, p.184) back to the public sphere. The solution can be “open debate” (Lipmann) and “propaganda.” (Lasswell and Bernays) Here, Dewey suggests an interesting solution. He points out that “physical machinery of transmission and circulation” (p.184) must be utilized in order for an organized Public to come into being. However, is it not true that the very machinery have brought about the atomization of the public? It seems that Dewey escapes from this contradiction by employing Aristotle causal theories and Thomistic transubstantiation: the physical machinery can be transubstantiated by changing formal, efficient and final cause of the machinery. He says: “[…] subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it […] it will be a means of life and not its despotic master.” (p.184) However, there still remains a question. What if machinery has inherent and invariable properties to atomize citizens, as Ong and McLuhan insisted?

3. Too many publics are there. But there is no genuine public on a national scale. To resolve this ironic situation, a new form of communicative measurement would be necessary. The corollary of this is the birth of mass communication and theories on it. The readings of this week clearly show how society evolved into mass society where mass communication was nearly inevitable. In this sense, the readings of this week are the prelude to the next week, the birth of mass communication.