The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

by Martin Gurri

I grew up reading newspapers. For half my life, this seemed like a natural way to acquire information. But that was an illusion based on monopoly conditions. Newspapers were old-fashioned industrial enterprises. Publishing plants were organized like factories. “All the news that’s fit to print” really meant “All the content that fits a predetermined chunk of pages.” In substance, the daily newspaper was an odd bundle of stuff—from government pronouncements and political reports to advice for unhappy wives, box scores, comic strips, lots of advertisements, and tomorrow’s horoscope. Newspapers made tacit claims which collapsed under the pressure of the information tsunami. They pretended to authority and certainty, for example. But the fatal flaw was the bundling, because it became clear that we had entered on a great unraveling, that the tide of the digital revolution boiled and churned against such artificial bundles of information and “disaggregated”: that is, tore them apart.

The voice of the vital communities was a new voice: that of the amateur, of the educated non-elites, of a disaffected and unruly public. It was at this level that the vast majority of new information was now produced and circulated. The intellectual earthquake which propelled the tsunami was born here. Communities of interest reflected the true and abiding tastes of the public. The docile mass audience, so easily persuaded by advertisers and politicians, had been a monopolist’s fantasy which disintegrated at first contact with alternatives. When digital magic transformed information consumers into producers, an established order—grand hierarchies of power and money and learning—went into crisis.