The Myth of the Informed Citizen

Communication and confusion.

My latest book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, comes out in paperback this week. To mark the occasion, here’s an essay adapted from the book.

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James McBey, General Headquarters, Bir Salem (1918).

In the middle years of the nineteenth century, as the building of the American telegraph network made instantaneous long-distance communication possible for the first time, a utopia of universal understanding appeared within reach. “A new channel of blessing has been opened for the world,” the prominent Boston minister Ezra Gannett told his congregation in an 1858 sermon. “It is an institution for the people. Its office is, to diffuse intelligence; its effect, to allay differences. Men who talk together daily cannot hate or disown one another.” The telegraph system’s “most remarkable” consequence, he went on, “will be the approach to a practical unity of the human race; of which we have never yet had a foreshadowing, except in the gospel of Christ.”

Telegraphy “binds together by a vital cord all the nations of the earth,” wrote the authors of The Story of the Telegraph, a bestseller published that same year. “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist.” The book took its epigraph from the Book of Psalms:

Their line is gone out through all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.

The 1865 International Telegraph Conference, held in Paris, declared itself “a veritable Peace Congress.” All the misunderstandings that once led to wars, the chairman of the gathering assured attendees, would be eradicated by “this electric wire which conveys thoughts through space at lightning speed, providing a speedy and unbroken link for the scattered members of the human race.” The telegraph is an “annihilator of distance,” proclaimed Germany’s Postmaster General in an 1876 speech. By liberating communication from “clod and hoof,” it would initiate an era of international fellowship. “We have received this wonderful force of nature as a gift from the Creator.”

The arrival of the telephone network later in the century further expanded people’s ability to share their thoughts and opinions over great distances. In an impassioned 1899 editorial celebrating the laying of transatlantic telecommunication cables, the New York Times urged Western Union, the giant American communication monopoly, to cut the cost of international dispatches. By making its rates more affordable, the paper argued, the company would extend the privilege and pleasure of high-speed, long-distance communication to the general public. And it would accomplish something of even greater import. It would help spread peace and goodwill throughout the world. “Nothing so fosters and promotes a mutual understanding and a community of sentiment and interests,” the editorialist declared, “as cheap, speedy, and convenient communication.” The truth of the statement would have seemed obvious to the paper’s readers.

The construction of telecommunication networks required enormous capital and extensive managerial coordination. In the United States, media became big business, as the rise of Western Union signified. To inventors, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives, the public’s celebration of communication proved a boon. Not only did it reinforce their messianic sense of self-importance; it served their business interests. It guaranteed them eager customers, enthusiastic investors, and indulgent regulators. As the pace of technological progress quickened, each advance in media systems triggered a new burst of millenarian rhetoric. Nikola Tesla, in an 1898 interview about his plan to create a wireless telegraph, said that he would be “remembered as the inventor who succeeded in abolishing war.” Not to be outdone, his rival, Guglielmo Marconi, declared in 1912 that his invention of radio would “make war impossible.”

Such cheery predictions were put to an early test in the summer of 1914. In the immediate aftermath of the June 28 assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, hundreds of urgent diplomatic messages raced between European capitals through recently strung telegraph and telephone wires. As the historian Stephen Kern has described, the rapid-fire dispatches quickly devolved into ultimatums and threats. Rather than calming the crisis, they inflamed it. “Communication technology imparted a breakneck speed to the usually slow pace of traditional diplomacy and seemed to obviate personal diplomacy,” Kern writes. “Diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication.” Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication. By August, World War I was under way.

* * *

Shortly after the archduke’s assassination, the young American journalist Walter Lippmann, fresh out of Harvard, brimming with radical ideas, and working on the launch of a progressive political magazine to be called The New Republic, boarded a ship for a holiday in Europe. After a month’s stay in England, where he attended a bucolic Lake District symposium on socialism organized by George Bernard Shaw, he crossed the English Channel to Brussels and, as he later recalled, “bought a ticket for a journey through Germany to Switzerland, where I meant to spend my vacation walking over mountain passes.” He remained “totally unconscious” of the political tensions rising around him, even as shooting broke out on the Continent. “I remember being astonished and rather annoyed when I went to the railroad station and found that the German border was closed.”

Lippmann made it back to America safely, and that fall The New Republic started publishing on schedule, to wide acclaim. The magazine took a neutral, isolationist stance toward the war, in line with prevailing liberal views. Lippmann, though, was shaken, both by the conflict and by his obliviousness to its imminence. He found himself questioning his understanding of the events taking place around him. The picture of the world that he held in his mind, he realized, did not match what was actually there. He was overcome, he wrote, by a “nausea of ideas.”

As reports of the European carnage grew more dire, his antipathy toward foreign entanglements dissolved, along with his pacifism. After German submarines began sinking civilian ships, including the crowded British ocean liner Lusitania, he became convinced that America had to side with England and France. In the spring of 1917, just weeks after President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany, Lippmann announced, to the shock of his colleagues, that he was leaving the magazine to become an assistant to Wilson’s secretary of war, Newton Baker.

A year later, having been given the rank of captain in the U.S. Army, he sailed back to Europe as a military intelligence agent, with orders to bolster the Allied propaganda campaign. In London, he participated in meetings where plans for the manipulation of public opinion were hashed out. Then, from an office near the western front in France, he used his literary skills to write leaflets urging German soldiers to desert, with promises of compassionate treatment and ample American-style meals of “beef, white bread, potatoes, prunes, coffee, milk, [and] butter.” Dropped onto the battlefield by the hundreds of thousands from balloons and planes, the leaflets were considered a great success. Surrendering German troops were often found to be carrying them when they were taken to prison camps.

When Lippmann returned home after the war, his “old optimism was gone,” reports his biographer Ronald Steel. His participation in the overseas propaganda effort, combined with his own early misperceptions about the war, left him with deep doubts about the human mind’s objectivity and stability. His unease was magnified by the success of the Wilson administration’s domestic propaganda campaign. Led by an ambitious Denver journalist and sometime politician named George Creel, the government’s Committee on Public Information brought together writers, artists, filmmakers, and celebrities, along with some 75,000 local volunteers, in a well-funded effort to promote national pride, demonize the enemy, and squelch dissenting views. The goal, as Creel put it in his memoir How We Advertised America, was to use all the tools of media—“the printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board”—to “weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct.” It succeeded. Turning propaganda into a form of entertainment, the campaign didn’t just unify the country. It stoked jingoistic passions and prejudices. Mobs tarred-and-feathered opponents of the war and beat up German immigrants.

In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct experience of them. The assumptions of America’s founders, a small, insular, largely agrarian elite, held little relevance to the bustling modern world, with its urban and industrial energies and lightning-quick communications. Society was much more complex now, and people’s sense of it came not from their own first-hand observations but through information received “at second, third, or fourth hand.”

The public’s understanding of social and political issues was fated to be incomplete, distorted, and easily manipulated. “The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding,” Lippmann wrote. “News comes at a distance; it comes helter-skelter, in inconceivable confusion; it deals with matters that are not easily understood; it arrives and is assimilated by busy and tired people.” The democratic citizen “must seize catchwords and headlines or nothing.”

He expanded his argument in the 1922 book Public Opinion, a seminal treatise on social psychology that the communication scholar James Carey would later call “the founding book in American media studies.” Before Lippmann’s work, democratic theory assumed that freedom, information, and the public good were tied together in a mutually reinforcing system. Carey summed up the logic: “if people are free, they will have perfect information; if [they have] perfect information, they can be rational in choosing the most effective means to their individual ends, and if so, in a manner never quite explained, the social good will result.” It was a nice theory, Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion, but a fantasy. It ignored the complexity of the world, and it ignored the perversity of human psychology.

The environment in which we live—the “real environment”—is “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,” he argued. “To act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model.” Drawing on whatever information is available to us and filtering it through our own desires and biases, each of us creates a mental “pseudo-environment”—a simplified and necessarily fictionalized picture of reality—and then we fit our thoughts and actions to the mirage’s contours.

Depending on the individual and his or her education and personality, the pseudo-environment can take the form of anything from a “complete hallucination” to a scientific “schematic model,” but it is never a true and full picture of reality. This is the reason, Lippmann suggested, that the beliefs and behavior of others often seem so mysterious to us. People all “live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones.” It is also why we’re so susceptible to attempts to modify our sense of reality by manipulating the information we receive. “What is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?”

We construct our pseudo-environment out of what Lippmann termed stereotypes. When confronted by “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world,” we have to rely on rules of thumb, intuitive judgments, and other mental shortcuts—heuristics, as cognitive psychologists call them—to make sense of things. We comprehend through intuition rather than analysis, quickly fitting new phenomena into familiar patterns. We see the world in “stereotyped shapes” derived from “our moral codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations” as well as the cultural symbols supplied by art, literature, and entertainment.

The more distracted we are, the more rapid and shallow our processing of information becomes—and the more we depend on stereotypes. Even in those rare moments when we’re granted the luxury of deep thought, our focus is necessarily narrow. We can’t think deeply about everything. So even the most thoughtful among us rely mainly on stereotypes in constructing a picture of the world. “There is economy in this,” Lippmann noted. “For the attempt to see things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting, and among busy affairs practically out of the question.” As we grow older, and more set in our opinions and routines, the stereotypes become all the more powerful as filters of reality. “We imagine most things before we experience them,” and our preconceptions “govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

* * *

Lippmann had his own pseudo-environment, of course, his own set of stereotypes. He was guilty at times of overreaching. He underestimated the public’s ability, even with imperfect information and mismatched views of reality, to muddle through. And the solution he offered at the end of his book—a bureaucracy of experts that would guide governmental decision-making while remaining unsullied by politics—seems like its own kind of pipe dream. But Public Opinion is a brave and psychologically astute work. With a cold yet sympathetic eye, Lippmann looks beyond the ideal citizen of democratic theory—“sovereign and omnicompetent,” in his memorable phrase—to bring into focus the real person: time-strapped and distracted, biased, susceptible to resentment and sentimentality, bombarded with messages and images, overstretched, wavering between confusion and overconfidence.

Lippmann would come to be attacked and dismissed as an antidemocratic elitist, but in painting his portrait of the average citizen, he was also, as he made clear in his next book, 1925’s The Phantom Public, offering a self-portrait:

My sympathies are with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.

Lippmann was not arguing that the public is stupid or incompetent. One of his central points, as the historian of journalism Michael Schudson emphasizes, “is that a capacity for self-government has nothing to do with native gray matter, but with the insufficiencies all of us share, a limited ability to attend to matters beyond our everyday experience.” Lippmann remained committed to liberty and democracy, even as he lost faith, Schudson writes, in “utopian aspirations for the role of the public as a participant in democratic decision making on a daily basis.” The ideal of the fully informed citizen isn’t “an undesirable ideal,” Lippmann wrote. It is “an unattainable ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer.”

Lippmann’s work anticipates the critique of the rational decision maker—the theoretical homo economicus of classical economics—that would be launched by social and cognitive psychologists later in the century. In a series of articles in the 1950s, the political scientist and future Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon argued that the model individual of theory—the man who has “knowledge of the relevant aspects of his environment which, if not absolutely complete, is at least impressively clear and voluminous”—was in need of an overhaul. Because human rationality is always constrained, or bounded, by limitations of “knowledge, foresight, skill, and time,” people have to construct mental “simplifications of the real world for purposes of choice.” Acknowledging Lippmann’s work as an antecedent to his own, Simon emphasized that people’s “bounded rationality” shapes and distorts their political choices as much as their economic ones.

Simon drew mainly on common sense in making his argument. In the 1950s, little empirical research existed on how people form opinions and make decisions. But that lack was soon remedied. Cognitive psychologists and social scientists, notably Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, would over the ensuing decades conduct myriad experiments and studies revealing how human perception and thought are skewed by all sorts of cognitive biases and misperceptions. It isn’t just that rationality is bounded in the everyday making of judgments and decisions; rationality is often absent altogether. Our intuition is always telling us stories about the world, and even when they diverge sharply from reality we’re eager to believe them. The assumption of an efficient marketplace of ideas rests on the ideal of a rational consumer of ideas, a homo philosophicus who, like his cousin economicus, turns out to be a fictional character.

A related line of research, into how people form political opinions and cast votes, has reached similar conclusions. Looking back on more than a half century of opinion surveys and voter research in their 2016 book Democracy for Realists, the political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels report that the “folk theory” of democracy, which “celebrates the wisdom of popular judgments by informed and engaged citizens,” has long been contradicted by the facts. “The political ‘belief systems’ of ordinary citizens are generally thin, disorganized, and ideologically incoherent.” Giving another nod to Lippmann, they conclude that “conventional democratic ideas amount to fairy tales.”

As for the rather small set of voters who spend a lot of time reading, thinking, and talking about politics, the research reveals that their heightened engagement rarely broadens their minds. They’re actually the ones most inclined to narrow and fervent partisanship. The more news they gobble up, the more convinced they are that they’re right and anyone with a different view is wrong. As Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing report in their 2022 study The Paradox of Democracy, “the most knowledgeable voters, the ones who pay the most attention to politics, are also the ones most prone to biased or blinkered decision-making.”

A similar effect is seen with educational achievement. The more educated people are, the more distorted their understanding of the views of their political opponents becomes. That seems to be particularly true of Democrats, according to an extensive 2019 study of American political polarization. The apparent reason is that well-educated Democrats go to great lengths to avoid fraternizing with Republicans. “As Democrats become more educated, their friend groups become less politically diverse,” the authors of the study write. They restrict their social set to versions of themselves. In sum, “the most highly engaged, active and educated people are least accurate in their views” of those they disagree with.

Well before the internet and social media came along, the historical, psychological, and psephological evidence was telling us that flooding the public square with more information from more sources was not going to open people’s minds or engender more thoughtful discussions. It wasn’t even going to make people better informed. Despite the revolutionary expansion in the public’s access to information of all sorts over the last quarter century, contemporary surveys clearly show that, as the political scientist Donald Kinder puts it, “Americans are no better informed on public affairs than they were a generation or two ago.”

So what exactly was the so-called democratization of media going to accomplish, in terms of the country’s political life? We now know the answer: It was going to widen the gap between the pseudo-environments in which people think and feel and the real environment in which they live and act. It was going to reveal a fundamental paradox of modern communication systems: More information can mean less understanding.

* * *

The philosopher John Dewey, America’s preeminent public intellectual in the early twentieth century, was deeply impressed by Lippmann’s Public Opinion—and deeply troubled by it. “To read the book is an experience in illumination,” he wrote in a 1922 review. “One finishes the book almost without realizing that it is perhaps the most effective indictment of democracy as currently conceived ever penned.” But Dewey believed that, for all the brilliance of Lippmann’s “relentless and realistic analysis,” his conclusions were unnecessarily dire. The journalist underestimated the gumption and good sense of the American people. While granting that the challenges facing democracy were as daunting as Lippmann made them out to be, Dewey maintained his faith in the public’s ability to meet them. “When necessity drives, invention and accomplishment may amazingly respond.”

Four years later, in a series of lectures delivered at Kenyon College, Dewey returned to the question of the public’s role in sustaining democracy, considering it in light of the arrival of the new technologies of mass communication. The lectures were refined and collected a year later in the book The Public and Its Problems, the fullest expression of Dewey’s political philosophy. In a stirring passage near the end of the volume, Dewey offers a counterpoint to Lippmann’s pessimism—a vision of a “Great Community” founded on a free and open system of communication that enables “an organized, articulate Public” to come into being.

The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means of life and not its despotic master. Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion. It had its seer in Walt Whitman. It will have its consummation when free social inquiry is indissolubly wedded to the art of a full and moving communication.

The view of the public—of ourselves—that Lippmann offered at the start of the twentieth century cut against the grain of American optimism and exceptionalism. Dewey’s view followed the grain. By the time the century came to a close and a new communication revolution was under way, Lippmann’s assessment had been rejected, dismissed as the sour rumblings of “an arrogant critic.” Dewey’s was enjoying a new ascendency, infusing the public’s sense of and confidence in the internet’s democratizing power.

Although it inspires still, much as Whitman’s verse does, Dewey’s vision of a Great Community, in which the machinery and the art of communication come into perfect, living harmony, has been shattered. We live in its ruins, overwhelmed by the information that was meant to enlighten us, imprisoned by the data that describe us. Lippmann’s words, by contrast, have grown only more resonant. In Public Opinion, now a century old, published in the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land, two other, equally unsparing testaments to the fragmentation of consciousness, to a world rendered incomprehensible by information, we find a portrait of ourselves and our situation. The way we see the social and political environment, the way we create a picture of reality through the welter of messages furnished by our ever more encompassing media, is and always will be refracted

by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead.

Dewey told us what we want to hear. Lippmann told us what we need to hear.