The Digital Public Sphere, From 1647 to Musk Twitter

#39b An Ethan Zuckerman Report

I’m a GenX American and have always wondered why my baby boomer siblings and baby boomer cousins had “Civics” textbooks and classes when they were in Junior High, but my peers and I were never taught this subject. Who banished “Civics” from the curriculum in the 1980s?

Ethan Zuckerman gave an hour-long presentation over a week ago and while I disagree with large portions of it, I found his comments on early-America civic life, and early-America newspaper subsidies quite interesting.

First Zuckerman talks about Civics in pre-Revolutionary America, at 26:00:

ZUCKERMAN: There is also another form of political participation put together by Cotton Mather who is one of the most influential creatures and thinkers in the early Commonwealth. He and his wife Elizabeth Hubbard start something called a Neighborhood Benefits Society. And it's basically eight or nine couples -- husband and wife -- getting together every week to pray, and then to talk about what would be best for the village: "the old Widow White might not make it through the winter without some wood, someone should get her some firewood" "who are the worthy young men that we should send off to that new Harvard University so that they may become men of God? We should decide that.”

Now this doesn't always work well—at some point Mather and his wife decide that some people are witches. This is actually where you get to say "The Witch Trials!”

But it is an interesting social institution which actually recognizes that women are running the home and running the moral education, the children that need to be fully involved with this. It ends up being the model for Ben Franklin's Junto which is a social club of middle class tradesmen, laborers, who get together to debate political issues of the day who prepare essays.

In the Junto [Ben Franklin’s Junto Club] you literally had to write an essay every three months to prepare it for your fellows and you would get together and talk about what is in the news, what have you heard, what are we going to discuss in today's discussion, and what needs doing in the community.

And it's an amazingly effective institution. Over 38 years it's responsible for the nation's Coast Lending Library, the University of Pennsylvania, the Union Fire Company, the Philadelphia Hospital, a volunteer militia and about half a dozen other things.

Zuckerman continues on Benjamin Franklin’s Junto Society:

There is an extraordinarily rich civic life happening in institutions like the Junto throughout the early Americas.

In fact it is so remarkable that is one of the biggest things that Alexis de Tocqueville writes about when he comes and travels in America in the early 1800s. He is amazed by this, this idea that projects that would normally be undertaken by wealthy businessmen or by a Duke or a Baron are taken on by voluntary societies who find each other and who carry out great works.

So you've got a free, free-ish dysfunctional but creation open press. You have a number of spaces in which people are convening regularly to talk about civic life. You also have a fairly remarkable preparation for participation in the civic life.

So one thing we have to say is that in Massachusetts our Founders are religious nut jobs. They are so radical in their Protestantism that they ban Christmas. This is the original War on Christmas. This actually comes from the Puritans, not from Fox News. But at the center of their faith is the idea that everybody should be able to read for themselves and interpret the Bible.

And what this means essentially to our Founders is that literacy and that ability to read is essentially a holy sacrament.

And so every family in Massachusetts is required to educate their children — boys and girls — in reading at minimum. At this point reading, writing and arithmetic are taught, in that order, so everyone knows how to read. You might know how to write if you have reason to do it you might know arithmetic if you're going to need to know how to do sums but you have near universal literacy.

In 1647, you get the old Deluder Satan Act….

Zuckerman eventually compares 1647 civic life to post-Facebook civic life, and finds people, even himself and his peers, less cut out for democracy today. But he muses on some remedies.

For a long time in its early years, the U.S. government subsidized newspapers, very indirectly.

At 37:17 Zuckerman gets to the point of newspaper subsidies:

I'm going to argue that the U.S government has actually stepped in a number of times in history to intervene and give us the healthier public sphere. And in ways that don't necessarily conflict with cherished ideas like freedom of speech. They have had to do with building infrastructures not to do with ordering people to say one thing or saying of other things.

Benjamin Rush is my favorite founding father. He's about 30 years younger than most of the founding fathers that you've heard of. He's America's first Surgeon General.

Uh he's my personal hero in some ways because he is the first medical professional to identify alcoholism as a disease rather than as a moral failing. Um he's a fascinating dude.

We actually know very little about him in part because he's the physician of most of the founding fathers. and they all basically say don't let Ben Rush say

what he knows about us. And so he actually doesn't get a decent biography until about three years ago. He's largely unreported on. But he's an amazing thinker about the public sphere.

And in this he is coached by Ben Franklin who is his lifetime mentor. And Franklin's vision for what the post office could be for America leads Rush to the coolest

piece of legislation you've never heard of, which is the Post Office Act of 1792.

Rush comes in and says "look, you've got to have a post office. There is no way to wire together this utterly vast nation unless we have mail spreading freely

between this giant country. This is the true non-electric wire of government. It is the only means of conveying heat and light to every individual in the federal commonwealth. It should be a constant injunction to the postmasters to convey newspapers **free of all charge for postage** right?

He almost gets it. What he gets instead of free newspapers is a massive subsidy.

For about 80 years after the passage of the Post Office Act, private letters cost roughly ten times as much as a newspaper. In fact if you are a cheapskate, the

cheapest way to write a letter home to mom is to buy a newspaper, make pinholes under all the words you want mom to read, and send that newspaper home, because it is a tenth of what sending a private letter will cost.

Newspapers are 95 of the post office's weight. They are 15 of the revenue. It is basically private business and private correspondence subsidizing a public sphere a print. That's not the crazy part here's the crazy part if you are a newspaper you can get gratis completely free exchange copies from any other newspaper willing to send you one.

By 1840, the average newspaper in the United States is receiving 4,300 exchange copies per year…

So the U.S. government, for the first 80, years subsidized newspapers without telling them what to report.

Seeing the talk in full, it becomes clear that Zuckerman is not arguing for the today’s U.S. government to send corporate subsidies to the C.E.O.s of social media corporations.