#walterlippmann — Public Fediverse posts

If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often.
-- Walter Lippmann

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Democracy

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Canyon #SlickRock #IcebergCanyon #LakePowell #Utah

If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often.
-- Walter Lippmann

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Democracy

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Canyon #SlickRock #IcebergCanyon #LakePowell #Utah

If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often.
-- Walter Lippmann

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Democracy

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Canyon #SlickRock #IcebergCanyon #LakePowell #Utah

If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often.
-- Walter Lippmann

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Democracy

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Canyon #SlickRock #IcebergCanyon #LakePowell #Utah

If the voter cannot grasp the details of the problems of the day because he has not the time, the interest or the knowledge, he will not have a better public opinion because he is asked to express his opinion more often.
-- Walter Lippmann

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Democracy

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Canyon #SlickRock #IcebergCanyon #LakePowell #Utah

"Companies like CNN or the Associated Press, they argue, are capitalist firms; it would be utterly naïve to imagine they would been willing to provide a friendly venue for anyone actively opposed to capitalism—let alone to carry anti-capitalist messages to the public." from https://www.davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2007-On-the-phenomenology-of-giant-puppets.pdf

Surely he read the prescient words of Walter Lippmann!

#Propaganda #WalterLippmann #Graeber #Anarchism

"Companies like CNN or the Associated Press, they argue, are capitalist firms; it would be utterly naïve to imagine they would been willing to provide a friendly venue for anyone actively opposed to capitalism—let alone to carry anti-capitalist messages to the public." from https://www.davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2007-On-the-phenomenology-of-giant-puppets.pdf

Surely he read the prescient words of Walter Lippmann!

#Propaganda #WalterLippmann #Graeber #Anarchism

"Companies like CNN or the Associated Press, they argue, are capitalist firms; it would be utterly naïve to imagine they would been willing to provide a friendly venue for anyone actively opposed to capitalism—let alone to carry anti-capitalist messages to the public." from https://www.davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2007-On-the-phenomenology-of-giant-puppets.pdf

Surely he read the prescient words of Walter Lippmann!

#Propaganda #WalterLippmann #Graeber #Anarchism

"Companies like CNN or the Associated Press, they argue, are capitalist firms; it would be utterly naïve to imagine they would been willing to provide a friendly venue for anyone actively opposed to capitalism—let alone to carry anti-capitalist messages to the public." from https://www.davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2007-On-the-phenomenology-of-giant-puppets.pdf

Surely he read the prescient words of Walter Lippmann!

#Propaganda #WalterLippmann #Graeber #Anarchism

"Companies like CNN or the Associated Press, they argue, are capitalist firms; it would be utterly naïve to imagine they would been willing to provide a friendly venue for anyone actively opposed to capitalism—let alone to carry anti-capitalist messages to the public." from https://www.davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2007-On-the-phenomenology-of-giant-puppets.pdf

Surely he read the prescient words of Walter Lippmann!

#Propaganda #WalterLippmann #Graeber #Anarchism

Di fatto, cioè, la Guerra fredda fu una sfida per l’acquisizione del potere in tutte le sue forme da parte delle due superpotenze

Vista la mancanza di accordo tra studiosi ed esperti e considerate le nuove domande di cui si arricchisce, in generale, la storia internazionale <14, la storiografia sulla Guerra fredda è molto ampia e destinata, con buone probabilità, ad arricchirsi ulteriormente: come ha sottolineato Federico Romero, questa pluralità di punti di vista e di diverse prospettive rivela la difficoltà di individuare l’oggetto dello studio o, in altre parole, la difficoltà di definire quale sia la natura della Guerra fredda.
[…] Di fatto, cioè, la Guerra fredda fu una sfida per l’acquisizione del potere in tutte le sue forme da parte delle due superpotenze, fosse esso militare, politico, culturale, o economico. Nel corso del conflitto, le vittorie e le sconfitte su ognuno di questi ambiti furono misurate dall’avanzata o la ritirata dei due modelli, quello liberal-capitalista a trazione statunitense da una parte e quello socialista incarnato dall’Unione Sovietica dall’altro <16. La dimensione ideologica alla base delle scelte dei governi delle due superpotenze risulta fondamentale per spiegarne le motivazioni: è questo scontro, del resto, il vero fil rouge della Guerra fredda <17.
Come ha sottolineato Melvyn Leffler, la Guerra fredda fu sia il prodotto di un insieme di contingenze che delle ideologie che animavano i leader di Washington e Mosca, in parte frutto di pregiudizi e paure per la sicurezza nazionale e in parte della volontà di esportare il proprio modello politico ad altri stati <18. Sia gli Stati Uniti che l’Unione Sovietica, infatti, nutrivano la convinzione di incarnare le caratteristiche del modello politico migliore possibile, l’unico in grado di garantire la pace mondiale: per gli Stati Uniti, la mera esistenza di un paese con i caratteri dell’Unione Sovietica rappresentava la possibilità che si creassero nuovamente le condizioni per lo scoppio di una guerra mondiale. Finché fosse esistita l’URSS, pensavano le élite politiche statunitensi, il mondo non avrebbe potuto raggiungere una condizione di pace vera e duratura. Per l’Unione Sovietica, invece, il problema principale non era tanto quello annientare gli Stati Uniti in quanto tali, quanto quello di annichilire il loro progetto imperialista riconducendo la nazione alla condizione di “normalità” di uno stato borghese senza velleità espansionistiche <19.
In virtù di questa auto-rappresentazione e di questo modo di dipingere l’avversario, le classi dirigenti delle due nazioni credevano di essere investite di una missione universale: per gli Stati Uniti, il loro modello politico di stampo liberal-capitalista era l’unico in grado di funzionare e andava esportato nel resto del mondo. In modo uguale e contrario, la classe dirigente dell’Unione sovietica riteneva che le contraddizioni interne dei sistemi capitalistici li avrebbero condotti all’estinzione e all’inevitabile presa del potere delle classi proletarie, cosa che avrebbe a sua volta portato alla creazione di regimi comunisti in tutto il mondo. Si trattava di convinzioni radicate nella cultura nazionale e dettate da una lettura ideologica e pre-orientata dei fenomeni politici, oltre che di una diversa interpretazione del corso della storia <20.
Nel contesto della Guerra fredda, una definizione ristretta dell’ideologia non esaurisce le spiegazioni dietro alle singole scelte politiche dei governi statunitense e sovietico. In effetti, come suggerisce l’antropologo statunitense Clifford Geertz, con il termine “ideologia” si deve indicare qualcosa di più ampio rispetto a ciò che siamo più comunemente abituati a pensare. Secondo Geertz, l’ideologia non è una dottrina del pensiero con uno specifico e codificato riferimento scritto, come può essere il marxismo-leninismo ma, piuttosto, un «insieme di convinzioni connesse che riduce le complessità di una particolare porzione della realtà in termini facilmente comprensibili e suggerisce modi appropriati per confrontarsi con essa» <21. In questo senso, qualsiasi visione politica contiene in sé i tratti dell’ideologia, una serie di convinzioni pre-determinate, basate su elementi di irrazionalità o su giudizi acquisiti su una determinata questione. Per lungo tempo, gli uomini politici degli Stati Uniti hanno ritenuto di essere privi di condizionamenti ideologici e sbandierato la necessità di intraprendere una lotta contro i regimi politici che ne erano soggetti. Gli Stati Uniti non operavano sulla base dell’ideologia ma sulla base della sicurezza nazionale e della difesa dei valori democratici. In realtà, come ha messo in luce la storiografia statunitense dalla corrente revisionista in avanti <22, l’ideologia ha occupato un ruolo centrale nelle decisioni prese dalla classe politica statunitense, tanto in politica interna quanto, forse in modo più evidente, in politica estera. L’eccezionalismo, l’idea dell’esistenza di una “gerarchia delle razze”, l’anti-radicalismo, rappresentano, così, i tasselli di un paradigma ben consolidato sulla base del quale sono state adottate numerose scelte politiche che non si possono spiegare in termini di mera convenienza materiale o di analisi realiste degli equilibri di potere <23.
Il rapporto tra politica ed ideologia nel conflitto tra Stati Uniti e Unione Sovietica fu messo in luce dal giornalista Walter Lippmann, che parlò per la prima volta di «Guerra fredda» in una raccolta di saggi pubblicata nel 1947 <24 in risposta al famoso saggio pubblicato da George Kennan in forma anonima su “Foreign Affairs”, la rivista del Council on Foreign Relations, nel 1947. Kennan, che lanciava così la dottrina del containment, scrisse che: “[…] The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation depending on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear” <25.
Le parole del diplomatico statunitense erano rivolte al pubblico di “Foreign Affairs”, fatto di specialisti e politici, ed erano destinate ad avviare un intenso dibattito sul ruolo degli Stati Uniti nel mondo dopo la fine della Seconda guerra mondiale. I decisori politici sotto l’amministrazione del presidente Truman sposarono le convinzioni di Kennan e ne fecero la base per la loro strategia nei confronti dell’Unione Sovietica. L’immagine del nemico si arricchì, nel tempo, di particolari preoccupanti per gli Stati Uniti. Nel 1950, Truman commissionò un documento al Policy Planning Staff del National Security Council che contenesse informazioni sulla politica sovietica (conosciuto come l’NSC 68). Il risultato fu un report dai toni quasi propagandistici, benché riservato esclusivamente all’uso interno del governo: «L’obiettivo del Cremlino […]», scrissero gli esperti del governo federale guidati da Paul Nitze, «è la sottomissione totale dei popoli sotto il suo controllo […]. La politica del Cremlino verso le aree che non sono sotto il suo controllo è l’eliminazione della resistenza al suo volere e l’estensione della sua influenza e controllo. Persegue questa politica perché non può […] tollerare l’esistenza di società libere» <26. Sulla base di una lettura così allarmante per il futuro degli Stati Uniti, la classe dirigente americana decise di mettere in campo tutti gli strumenti utili a spostare in proprio favore gli equilibri internazionali. Le armi e la diplomazia non sarebbero più stati sufficienti a questo sforzo; bisognava sconfiggere i sovietici anche sul piano dell’immaginario collettivo, conquistando “i cuori e le menti” dell’opinione pubblica mondiale.
[NOTE]
14 Thomas Zeiler, The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field, in “The Journal of American History”, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2009, pp. 1053-1073 e le risposte di Mario Del Pero, On the Limits of Thomas Zeiler’s Historiographical Triumphalism, in “The Journal of American History”, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2009, pp. 1079-1082 e Jessica Gienow-Hecht, What Bandwagon? Diplomatic History Today, in “The Journal of American History”, Vol. 95, No. 4, 2009, pp. 1083-1086.
16 Nigel Gould Davis citato in Giles Scott-Smith, Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network. Cold War Internationale, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, p. 2.
17 Si veda la riflessione di Leopoldo Nuti, On recule pour mieux sauter, or “What needs to be done” (to understand the 1970s), in Pons and Romero (edited by), Reinterpreting the End of the Cold War., cit., pp. 39-51.
18 Cfr. Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: the United States, the Soviet Union and the Cold War, New York, Hill and Wang, 2007.
19 Stephanson, Fourteen Notes, cit.
20 Westad, The Global Cold War, cit., p. 40.
21 Clifford Geertz citato in Michael H. Hunt, Ideology, in Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan (edited by), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 222.
22 L’inizio della corrente storiografica revisionista è attribuito a William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1962. Cfr. anche Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood (edited by), Imagined Histories. American Historians Interpret the Past, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998, Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century. American Foreign Policy since 1900, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1999 e Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007; Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009.
23 Cfr. Michael H. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1987.
24 Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: a Study in U.S. Foreign Policy, New York, Harper, 1947.
25 X, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, in “Foreign Affairs”, Vol. 25, No. 4, Jul., 1947, p. 582.
26 Ibidem.
Alice Ciulla, Gli intellettuali statunitensi e la “questione comunista” in Italia, 1964-1980, Tesi di dottorato, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, 2012

#1947 #AliceCiulla #anticomunismo #autoRappresentazione #CliffordGeertz #FedericoRomero #fredda #GeorgeKennan #guerra #ideologie #MelvynLeffler #pace #PaulNitze #storiografia #superpotenze #URSS #USA #WalterLippmann

« La création du #consentement n’est pas un art nouveau. [...] Une #révolution est en train de prendre place infiniment plus signifiante que n’importe quel changement du #pouvoir économique »
(ibid. : 313-314) - Walter LippMann

@lemonde : https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-public-fantome-de-walter-lippmann_1104809_3260.html

#autodefense #autodefenseintellectuelle #WalterLippmann #Pulitzer #livre

« La création du #consentement n’est pas un art nouveau. [...] Une #révolution est en train de prendre place infiniment plus signifiante que n’importe quel changement du #pouvoir économique »
(ibid. : 313-314) - Walter LippMann

@lemonde : https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-public-fantome-de-walter-lippmann_1104809_3260.html

#autodefense #autodefenseintellectuelle #WalterLippmann #Pulitzer #livre

« La création du #consentement n’est pas un art nouveau. [...] Une #révolution est en train de prendre place infiniment plus signifiante que n’importe quel changement du #pouvoir économique »
(ibid. : 313-314) - Walter LippMann

@lemonde : https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-public-fantome-de-walter-lippmann_1104809_3260.html

#autodefense #autodefenseintellectuelle #WalterLippmann #Pulitzer #livre

« La création du #consentement n’est pas un art nouveau. [...] Une #révolution est en train de prendre place infiniment plus signifiante que n’importe quel changement du #pouvoir économique »
(ibid. : 313-314) - Walter LippMann

@lemonde : https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-public-fantome-de-walter-lippmann_1104809_3260.html

#autodefense #autodefenseintellectuelle #WalterLippmann #Pulitzer #livre

« La création du #consentement n’est pas un art nouveau. [...] Une #révolution est en train de prendre place infiniment plus signifiante que n’importe quel changement du #pouvoir économique »
(ibid. : 313-314) - Walter LippMann

@lemonde : https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/10/09/le-public-fantome-de-walter-lippmann_1104809_3260.html

#autodefense #autodefenseintellectuelle #WalterLippmann #Pulitzer #livre

• In his Public Opinion Lippmann argues that most people only engage with the world beyond their milieu for a small time each day and that the main means through which they do so is text. This provides an interesting reference point for understanding how social media has changed our relationship to the public sphere: our engagement now tends to be multimodal and patterns of use of social media mean it seeps into everyday life in a porous fashion, as opposed to being a specialised activity we engage in at a routinised point in the day.
• Is what he describes as “public affairs” co-extensive with the “the public sphere”? ^^What was his definition of public affairs^^?
• He’s a more ambiguous and nuanced thinker than Chomsky led me to believe. The crucial point is that citizens are not inherently competent for public affairs and that this represents a challenge which many have evaded for a range of ideological reasons. Obviously it remains a contested question what ‘competent’ can and should mean but underlying it is a very significant point: once we move beyond a society that is “completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone can know all about everything that happens” then our “ideas deal with events that are out of sight and hard to grasp”. These ideas and the actions they lead to are significant for public life, hence the challenge. His point is that we need an “independent, expert organisation for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions” because there will always be a gap between immediate experience and wider events of potential concern within a society that is moved beyond a certain level of complexity.
• I find his underlying framing of the media extremely persuasive: to traverse the world men must have maps of the world. His point is that those representations have consequences because they shape action, even if it is the reality beyond the representation which accounts for the success or otherwise of that action. Whatever we believe to be a ‘true picture’ of our environment will determine how we act within and in relation to that environment.
• I found his account of ‘social set’ interesting as a theory of normative reference groups. This is integral to what Maggie is talking about as [[communicative reflexivity]], with Lippman’s framing helping us see how these are bound up in the reproduction of status and material position:
  • > Our social set consists of those who figure as people in the phrase “people are saying”; they are the people whose approval matters most intimately to us. In big cities among men and women of wide interests and with the means for moving about, the social set is not so rigidly defined. But even in big cities, there are quarters and nests of villages containing self-sufficing social sets. In smaller communities there may exist a freer circulation, a more genuine fellowship from after breakfast to before dinner. But few people do not know, nevertheless, which set they really belong to, and which not.
• I do see Chomsky’s point now I’ve listened to Lippmann talk about the deadening conditions of the worker and the effect they have on their inability to reason in a way he deems adequate. However whereas Lippmann sees this as an argument for experts to steer democracy, there’s a socialist response which is to argue that capitalist labour is incompatible with democratic citizenship and that it’s capitalist labour which needs to change ✊
• This is how he describes the challenge involved in thinking in circumstances where [[distraction]] is ubiquitous in chapter 5 of public opinion:
  • > If the comparatively simple conditions of a laboratory can so readily flatten out discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the subject’s interest and self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in the general glare that does not flash like an electric sign? The life of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms, but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes on in a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. “The intolerable burden of thought” is a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable. It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural. Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament.
• His critique of ‘economic determinism’ is curiously reminiscent of Maggie’s attack on the concept of ‘vested interests’ as it tends to be deployed. Lippmann argues that these interests will enter into how someone believes but not determine what they believe. Maggie’s point is that it doesn’t determine what they will do as a consequence of those beliefs.
• I found this passage from Lippmann’s Public Opinion reminiscent of what C Wright Mills later described as the sociological imagination. This meant for Mills a sensitivity towards the interconnection between private troubles and public issues, enabling someone to see how the seemingly idiosyncratic facts of their lived experience are shaped by wider social and historical forces. It’s an antidote to the individualisation of social problems by making clear how the circumstances we confront are not of our choosing and furthermore they are confronted by others for similar reasons. What Lippmann describes her is the absence of sociological imagination, with my emphasis added:
  • > The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications, according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the individual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs, anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment. He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargementof his private life.
• Lippmann sees media as being about providing a picture of the world beyond one’s immediate milieu. This is necessary for citizenship in a complex society but it’s something that needs to be enacted institutionally because of the cognitive and structural limitations on the ability of a citizen to gain this knowledge otherwise. These institutions inevitably come with severe limitations, marked by the context in which they emerged. It’s fruitful to consider social media in these terms as seemingly offering an immediate personalised way of gaining direct knowledge from beyond our context, with this human quality contrasting sharply to the mediated and self-serving character of MSM institutions. The reality of course is that both are engineered, both involve discreet interests rarely disclosed and each presents what is in a sense a misleading view of the world beyond our milieu.
• The way he writes about the theory of the ‘omnicompetent citizen’ positions it as an implausible set of beliefs rather than a foundational assumption for democratic theory.
• The way Lippmann describes “that freedom of mind when men are not too immediately concerned by practical decision” is incredibly reminiscent of Bourdieu on [[skhole]].
• The way he describes “a certain sustaining techne” which animates the confidence of the natural scientists is interesting for thinking about the politics of discipline surrounding computational social science.
• He argues the media “can only report what has been reported for it by other institutions” suggesting that facts are produced by institutions and circulated through the media.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/29/my-notes-on-walter-lippmanns-public-opinion/

#media #publicOpinion #publicSphere #walterLippmann

• In his Public Opinion Lippmann argues that most people only engage with the world beyond their milieu for a small time each day and that the main means through which they do so is text. This provides an interesting reference point for understanding how social media has changed our relationship to the public sphere: our engagement now tends to be multimodal and patterns of use of social media mean it seeps into everyday life in a porous fashion, as opposed to being a specialised activity we engage in at a routinised point in the day.
• Is what he describes as “public affairs” co-extensive with the “the public sphere”? ^^What was his definition of public affairs^^?
• He’s a more ambiguous and nuanced thinker than Chomsky led me to believe. The crucial point is that citizens are not inherently competent for public affairs and that this represents a challenge which many have evaded for a range of ideological reasons. Obviously it remains a contested question what ‘competent’ can and should mean but underlying it is a very significant point: once we move beyond a society that is “completely self-contained in its interests and so small that everyone can know all about everything that happens” then our “ideas deal with events that are out of sight and hard to grasp”. These ideas and the actions they lead to are significant for public life, hence the challenge. His point is that we need an “independent, expert organisation for making the unseen facts intelligible to those who have to make the decisions” because there will always be a gap between immediate experience and wider events of potential concern within a society that is moved beyond a certain level of complexity.
• I find his underlying framing of the media extremely persuasive: to traverse the world men must have maps of the world. His point is that those representations have consequences because they shape action, even if it is the reality beyond the representation which accounts for the success or otherwise of that action. Whatever we believe to be a ‘true picture’ of our environment will determine how we act within and in relation to that environment.
• I found his account of ‘social set’ interesting as a theory of normative reference groups. This is integral to what Maggie is talking about as [[communicative reflexivity]], with Lippman’s framing helping us see how these are bound up in the reproduction of status and material position:
  • > Our social set consists of those who figure as people in the phrase “people are saying”; they are the people whose approval matters most intimately to us. In big cities among men and women of wide interests and with the means for moving about, the social set is not so rigidly defined. But even in big cities, there are quarters and nests of villages containing self-sufficing social sets. In smaller communities there may exist a freer circulation, a more genuine fellowship from after breakfast to before dinner. But few people do not know, nevertheless, which set they really belong to, and which not.
• I do see Chomsky’s point now I’ve listened to Lippmann talk about the deadening conditions of the worker and the effect they have on their inability to reason in a way he deems adequate. However whereas Lippmann sees this as an argument for experts to steer democracy, there’s a socialist response which is to argue that capitalist labour is incompatible with democratic citizenship and that it’s capitalist labour which needs to change ✊
• This is how he describes the challenge involved in thinking in circumstances where [[distraction]] is ubiquitous in chapter 5 of public opinion:
  • > If the comparatively simple conditions of a laboratory can so readily flatten out discrimination, what must be the effect of city life? In the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the subject’s interest and self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in the general glare that does not flash like an electric sign? The life of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms, but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes on in a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. “The intolerable burden of thought” is a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable. It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural. Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament.
• His critique of ‘economic determinism’ is curiously reminiscent of Maggie’s attack on the concept of ‘vested interests’ as it tends to be deployed. Lippmann argues that these interests will enter into how someone believes but not determine what they believe. Maggie’s point is that it doesn’t determine what they will do as a consequence of those beliefs.
• I found this passage from Lippmann’s Public Opinion reminiscent of what C Wright Mills later described as the sociological imagination. This meant for Mills a sensitivity towards the interconnection between private troubles and public issues, enabling someone to see how the seemingly idiosyncratic facts of their lived experience are shaped by wider social and historical forces. It’s an antidote to the individualisation of social problems by making clear how the circumstances we confront are not of our choosing and furthermore they are confronted by others for similar reasons. What Lippmann describes her is the absence of sociological imagination, with my emphasis added:
  • > The character they give it varies not only with sex and age, race and religion and social position, but within these cruder classifications, according to the inherited and acquired constitution of the individual, his faculties, his career, the progress of his career, an emphasized aspect of his career, his moods and tenses, or his place on the board in any of the games of life that he is playing. What reaches him of public affairs, a few lines of print, some photographs, anecdotes, and some casual experience of his own, he conceives through his set patterns and recreates with his own emotions. He does not take his personal problems as partial samples of the greater environment. He takes his stories of the greater environment as a mimic enlargementof his private life.
• Lippmann sees media as being about providing a picture of the world beyond one’s immediate milieu. This is necessary for citizenship in a complex society but it’s something that needs to be enacted institutionally because of the cognitive and structural limitations on the ability of a citizen to gain this knowledge otherwise. These institutions inevitably come with severe limitations, marked by the context in which they emerged. It’s fruitful to consider social media in these terms as seemingly offering an immediate personalised way of gaining direct knowledge from beyond our context, with this human quality contrasting sharply to the mediated and self-serving character of MSM institutions. The reality of course is that both are engineered, both involve discreet interests rarely disclosed and each presents what is in a sense a misleading view of the world beyond our milieu.
• The way he writes about the theory of the ‘omnicompetent citizen’ positions it as an implausible set of beliefs rather than a foundational assumption for democratic theory.
• The way Lippmann describes “that freedom of mind when men are not too immediately concerned by practical decision” is incredibly reminiscent of Bourdieu on [[skhole]].
• The way he describes “a certain sustaining techne” which animates the confidence of the natural scientists is interesting for thinking about the politics of discipline surrounding computational social science.
• He argues the media “can only report what has been reported for it by other institutions” suggesting that facts are produced by institutions and circulated through the media.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/29/my-notes-on-walter-lippmanns-public-opinion/

#media #publicOpinion #publicSphere #walterLippmann

We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice the thing is man or sunset and see chiefly what our mind is already full of on these subjects.
-- Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)

⬆ #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Perception

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunrise #LakeSantaFe #Florida

We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice the thing is man or sunset and see chiefly what our mind is already full of on these subjects.
-- Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)

⬆ #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Perception

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunrise #LakeSantaFe #Florida

#Books shipping to new homes this morning.

#ArtBooks #printmaking #sculpture #PaulManship #ShipModels #Collecting #WalterLippmann #SocialCriticism

#Books shipping to new homes this morning.

#ArtBooks #printmaking #sculpture #PaulManship #ShipModels #Collecting #WalterLippmann #SocialCriticism

We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice the thing is man or sunset and see chiefly what our mind is already full of on these subjects.
-- Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)

⬆ #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Perception

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice the thing is man or sunset and see chiefly what our mind is already full of on these subjects.
-- Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)

⬆ #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Perception

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

We do not so much see this man and that sunset; rather we notice the thing is man or sunset and see chiefly what our mind is already full of on these subjects.
-- Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)

⬆ #Quotes #WalterLippmann #Perception

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #PitcherPlants #Flowers #Florida

"The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him, in other men, the conviction and the will to carry on." - Walter Lippmann #Leadership #SaturdayMotivation #QuoteOfTheDay #ContinuousImprovement #Coaching #LyonStrategic #WalterLippmann