ABSTRACT
Richard Sennett believes the rise of a suspicious public to be a consequence of a wider set of activities than those represented by the mass media. Centralized media similarly provide the citizen with observations, which no matter how skillfully or objectively provided, turn the modern public increasingly toward spectatorship. Both Alvin Gouldner and Sennett argue that the style of "objectivity" in use by the modern media may foster suspicion precisely because this style of presenting things seems to withhold information on how the meaning of events is understood. Jurgen Habermas, a scholar is aware of how the control and management of media institutions can generate quite different potentials from those John Dewey had in mind. Much as George Herbert Mead had stressed the reflexive capacity of language in stabilizing our social reality, his contemporary at the University of Chicago, John Dewey, has pointed to the ways in which the rise of new technologies of communication could destabilize that reality.
