Before concluding our discussion of Cherny and beginning Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, it will be useful (I hope) to talk/vent/process a bit about the writing process and what (if anything) you learned from preparing this essay. As this is the first college essay that some of you have written, and as papers are too rarely talked about after they have been completed, this kind of reflection might be interesting and therapeutic; at the very least it might help some people think about formulating a topic for the next essay.
Introduction II: Conclusions from Cherny
We didn't quite finish discussing The Next Deal last time, so Ari will wrap things up with his discussion about Cherny's views about technology and its role in, and effects on, politics in any given (modern) age.
Public Opinion, Parts 1-4
Last week, we talked about some of the questions raised by a focus on information in the realm of politics, and specifically in thinking about what (a) democracy is. We noted that information was something to be distinguished from judgement, and of course a familiar issues in debates about democracy concerns to what extent citizens' capacity for judgement should be attended to along with the extent to which they should have access to particular kinds of information. In Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, written in 1922, we find a provocative challenge to our attitudes about what we can and should expect from popular judgement in the realm of politics, and thus to our expectations for democracy.
As with our reading of the passages from de Toqueville, we can ask with nearly every page of Lippmann:
We'll go Part by Part through Public Opinion, with presentations and discussions lead by members of the Seminar.
For Monday:: Read parts 5 and 6 of Public Opinion, and begin thinking about a topic for the Part Two essay.