“Citizenship spins upon the axis of common information; its responsibilities require, at their base, the sense of security that comes from knowing that what I know is fundamentally similar to what you know.”
While this quote may sound as if it’s ripped directly from the pages E.D. Hirsch’s new book, The Making of Americans, it actually appears in a remarkable essay in the Columbia Journalism Review. “Common Knowledge,” by Megan Garber, examines the fragmentation of news and its potential impact on our democracy. News, writes Garber, is “democracy’s common denominator.”
Our political system demands not only that citizens receive a steady flow of information that will, in turn, allow them to be democratic decision-makers—but also that the information in question be, in a profound sense, shared. “A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it,” James Madison wrote, “is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both.” Madison wasn’t one to mince words; and it’s telling, here, that popular information, shared information—rather than simply information itself—was his concern. Without “popular information,” we lose not only our baseline of knowledge about the political world, but also our bearings within it. We risk becoming subject, as it were, to subjectivity itself—and ending up with a society, as William James had it, in which “people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.”
The parallels between education and news are striking. As news consumption increasingly defines itself “according to cliques rather than commons,” Garber points out, “cognition itself becomes ever more customizable.”
An infrastructure of information consumption that fosters homophily—that allows us to cocoon ourselves in our own worldviews—compromises our ability to relate to each other, discursively, as citizens of a diverse nation. It fosters distance and dissonance, rather than resisting them. It compromises that nebulous yet necessary space in democratic discourse: the public sphere. And it highlights a paradox of the digital age—that the diversity of our news outlets threatens the broader diversity of public discourse. The democratization of information, it turns out, is in some ways at odds with democracy itself.
Garber’s concerns are ultimately identical to Hirsch’s. And her question–How do we determine which information will keep us broadly synchronized with everyone else?–is a question with equal potency for education and journalism.
Of what value is discourse, after all, when we’re unable able to talk about, and act upon, the same things? Imagine a book club in which everyone shows up having read different books—one person having read The Brothers Karamozov, another having read Pride and Prejudice, another having read Twilight. Or a town hall meeting in which one citizen comes prepared to talk about teacher tenure in the local schools, another to talk about improving a neighborhood park, another to talk about rewriting local zoning laws. There may be some discussion, sure—but that discussion will be crippled to the point of absurdity.
“Democratic discourse requires the core commonality of shared information,” Garber concludes. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”
