Talk:Public Opinion (book)

1. I have no "issues" with Phrost, nor is that why I edit articles. I made these changes because of Wikipedia policy and English style and euphony.
2. The final sentence is a bit obscure. What exactly is it to "mirror" some else's writings? Does Lippmann use Nietzsche, or follow him, or is he influenced by him? --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 07:46, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

Why does this article open up with a quote from the book? It looks really awkward.Memeligutsa (talk) 13:52, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

page citations and ...

Might someone have time and interest to add more page references? I've added a few that I know about, but I'm not eager to study the entire book searching for the other apparent quotes.

Also, I replaced the citation to the copy on archive.org to the entry on Wikidata. I did this for multiple reasons. Primarily, I've found Wikidata items like this to be more work initially but much more preferable if more than one Wikimedia Foundation project article uses the same source. It's easier to maintain against link rot. And all the citations to a Wikidata item from within Wikimedia Foundation projects can be found from that Wikidata item. That can be useful for some purposes. In addition, in this case, p. # 162 (p. 175/449) on archive.org is complete blurred and unreadable. DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:40, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

people with little intellectual engagement

Did Lippmann actually use the phrase "little intellectual engagement" to describe how "certain members of society ... attend to life"?

I can believe he may have. He did seem to be an elitist. However, it would be useful to have a page citation.

Decades ago, I heard many people making comments roughly like that. I made them myself, until I heard some of the dumbest people I knew make such statements.

This phrase is ultimately insulting. The phenomenon is described by the research for which Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. I plan to add mention of that to this article.

I believe this article would be more useful if it had a page citation for where Lippmann used the phrase, "certain members of society who attend to life with little intellectual engagement." If he did NOT use that phrase, then the verbiage should be modified to be less offensive, I think.

Thanks to all who have helped to make this important article as good as it is. DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:52, 26 August 2020 (UTC)

who creates "pseudo-environment"

As of 2020-08-28 the second sentence in the "Public Opinion (book)#News and truth" section read, "Those who are most familiar with the greatest amount of facts regarding a certain environment, construct a pseudo-environment ... ."

Did Lippmann say this? If yes, where?

This seems to me to reflect a misunderstanding of what I understand Lippmann to have said. In particular, he wote, "The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance" between anybody and their environment. Each person constructs a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone's pseudo-environment is a fiction. People "live [and act] in the same world, but they think and feel [and decide] in different ones." Lippman's “environment” might be called “reality,” and his “pseudo-environment” seems equivalent to what today is called “constructed reality.”

Opinion leaders have a large influence on the pseudo-environments / constructed realities of their followers, exploiting confirmation bias in the process. The mainstream media everywhere do this to benefit those who control the money for the media.

I don't feel I can afford the time now to try to fix this, but I think this article could benefit from more careful checking what Lippmann actually said, documented with page citations, and more careful wordsmithing, so it more accurately portrays what Lippmann actually said -- and connects it to more recent research, e.g., like that for which Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. DavidMCEddy (talk) 16:28, 28 August 2020 (UTC)

Hey, just checked the talk page here. I'm not exactly reading his book, but a summary and various opinions based on his writings. I summarized and added some citations, including the Lippman-Dewey debate, which I believe you will have some interest in reading it. Most of the discussion in this article forgets to mention a much earlier discussion about democracy and technocracy.

Also, don't expect to see Lippman's book to connect to recent research too well. Lippman never thought or had to think about social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which had a known impact in democratic and autocratic countries. Tetizeraz - (talk page) 23:01, 7 August 2022 (UTC)

References