Making Publics

One of the themes of chapter 5 of the Authenticity Hoax is the threat to the public sphere from too much sharing. Essentially, I argue that only children have no privacy in our culture, and that a culture that does not value privacy is effectively infantile. I'm still convinced of the merits of that argument, but one issue that I don't get into (because I was not really aware of it) is the opposite problem: Not how publics are destroyed, but how they get made in the first place. 

The excellent Jeff Jarvis brought this to my attention over drinks a month or so ago, and I've been meaning to make some time to start digging into the literature. And so it was with a strange sense of the serendipitous that I found myself listening to the CBC a few weeks ago, during a long drive out of Toronto. The show was Ideas, and the subject was the origin of the modern public. The part I managed to catch didn't impress me too much -- it was largely devoted to the musings of McGill professor Darin Barney, whose warmed-over Heideggerianisms struck me as fantastically juvenile. 

But it turns out that I was catching only the tail end of what turns out to have been an epic 14-part series on the history of the public sphere, from the reformation to the news revolution and beyond. This looks to be amazing stuff, and I hope to find some time to give it some proper attention. The main webpage for the series with links for streaming and podcasts is here; if anyone has heard any of it and has any thoughts, please drop me a line.