Thread! I did my PhD dissertation 34 years ago on the concept of "the public" as the body that is said to be informed by the press. I had to digest everything that was written about what a modern public is, why we care about it, what public opinion is, how it comes into being. 1/
Like the weather, or the news, "the public" is one of those terms we know so well from everyday speech that it can be difficult to think with— or about. The most heroic attempt was made by the American philosopher John Dewey in his 1927 classic, 'The Public and its Problems.' 2/
I want to isolate one part of Dewey's definition of the public because it bears on our current struggle with the coronavirus. This is from my 1999 book, 'What are Journalists For?' yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030007… 3/ 
Some key elements in Dewey's definition: For there to be a "public," the scale of human settlement must advance to the point where people dwell in a connected world— interdependent not just on family members or neighbors across the way, but on, say, farmers in another country. 4/
Also needed for there to be a genuine public is broad understanding of these interdependencies. Until people grasp that the salmon they love are dying because the dam that makes their electricity makes it harder for the fish to spawn, there really is no public for that issue. 5/
Of course people will have different views on what to do. But unless they also understand what Dewey called the "indirect consequences" of generating electricity from hydo power, there can be no public opinion worth respecting. It cannot guide problem solvers or policy makers. 6/
Dewey had a term he used for that strange condition in which people are caught in webs of interdependence (thus forming a proto public) but they don't see it, they don't feel it, and they don't understand how their fates are connected. He called that sort of public "inchoate." 7/
For showing how we live interdependently you cannot beat a global pandemic. Since Dewey wrote, modern life has grown vastly more interdependent — more "global" — and yet publics still emerge from the information flows in nation states. The global public is itself inchoate. 8/
One reason I waded into these abstractions was to understand the job of the press in a richer way. When journalists let us know that action in one sphere affects people in another, when they help us understand those connections in a compelling way that we share with others... 9/
...when they succeed in persuading us that we are not islands in a neutral sea but parts of an interdependent community, nation, world, they are not only in-forming, they are actually forming a "public." This is one of the most important things they can do: public formation. END
