User:Roger A. Lohmann/sandbox

"When there isn't anything else fun to do, I go outside and play in my sandbox."
 * Anon. (Age 8)

Opinion Leaders
(These two sections are being written for addition to the Public article I've been working on.)

An important contribution to the process of public opinion formation was the Lazarsfeld-Katz "two-step flow of communication" model and the related concept of opinion leaders. Opinion leaders, in this model, are the most active and best informed media consumers, who come to be respected for their expertise by others in their daily lives, and consequently through processes of social influence have an extraordinary influence on public opinion, represented not only by their own opinions but also those who they have influenced. Opinion leadership tends to be subject-specific, with physicians having an inordinate influence on issues of medicine and health, engineers on technical questions, clergy on religious matters and so on. The concept of champions has sometimes been used to translate the behavioral insights of the two-step flow model into the context of opinion formation as part of the policy process in organizations.

Dewey and Lippman on Publics
Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was a working journalist and political commentator. Along with Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, he was one of the founding editors of The New Republic and a highly influential force in American journalism during the first half of the twentieth century. Among other notable contributions, he popularized use of the term "stereotype" which in his definition referred to "the pictures in our heads". In addition to his role as a journalist, Lippman was an informal advisor to several presidents from Woodrow Wilson through Lyndon Johnson.

In Public Opinion (1922) Lippmann offered the fullest statement of his elitist view of representative democracy, the general public and the process of formation of public opinion. Lippmann believed that modern industrial democracies had become too complex for the average citizen to effectively understand and government must be largely in the hands of an expert-based governing class. He saw the accuracy of news and the protection of journalistic sources as the principal problem of democracy and presented the public largely in Platonic terms as a bewildered and rather passive herd. In modern, industrial society, according to Lippmann, it was the job of the journalist to translate the actions and motives of the "governing class" of bureaucratic experts and specialists into terms that the general public could comprehend. He found the notion of actual government by the people (as opposed to their better-informed representatives) altogether implausible. Three years later, in The Phantom Public (1925), his view reached what was for him its outer limit when Lippmann recognized that members of the governing class of experts could themselves be outsiders to a particular problem, and also not possessed of sufficient accurate information and capable of effective action. (Lippmann may have been influenced in this view, some authorities believe, by the views of European Facists who were already in power in Italy and gaining strength elsewhere in Europe at the time or by advocates of technocracy.)

(The following paragraphs were taken directly from Wikipedia and need to be corrected and rewritten):

In The Public and its Problems, Dewey presents a rebuttal to Walter Lippmann’s treatise on the role of journalism in democracy. Lippmann’s model was a basic transmission model in which journalists took information given them by experts and elites, repackaged that information in simple terms, and transmitted the information to the public, whose role was to react emotionally to the news. In his model, Lippmann supposed that the public was incapable of thought or action, and that all thought and action should be left to the experts and elites.

Dewey refutes this model by assuming that politics is the work and duty of each individual in the course of his daily routine. The knowledge needed to be involved in politics, in this model, was to be generated by the interaction of citizens, elites, experts, through the mediation and facilitation of journalism. In this model, not just the government is held accountable, but the citizens, experts, other actors as well.

Dewey also revisioned journalism to fit this model by taking the focus from actions or happenings and changing the structure to focus on choices, consequences, and conditions, in order to foster conversation and improve the generation of knowledge in the community. Journalism would not just produce a static product that told of what had already happened, but the news would be in a constant state of evolution as the community added value by generating knowledge. The audience would disappear, to be replaced by citizens and collaborators who would essentially be users, doing more with the news than simply reading it.

Dewey’s journalism was revolutionary because it changed the structure from choosing a winner of a given situation to posing alternatives and exploring consequences. His effort to change journalism, involve citizens, stimulation, was all under the auspices of creating the Great Community he wrote of in The Public and its Problems: “Till the Great Society is converted in to a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community” (Dewey, pg. 144).

Dewey believed that communication creates a great community, and citizens who actively participate in public life contribute to that community. "The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy." (The Public and its Problems, p. 149). This Great Community can only occur with "free and full intercommunication." (p. 211) Communication can be understood as journalism - the traditional forum in which people communicate.