The Communities Involved in Common Knowledge

I have long since been fascinated by the concept of “common knowledge“. People often appeal to this concept, but that doesn’t make it any more clear what is actually meant by the term.

This week, two examples of how such “common knowledge” interferes with publicacy appeared on my radar.

First, on another blog, I wrote about how a teenager expressed quite clearly that she seemed to be confused about the terminology related to publicacy (see “I think ‘publish’ is not the accurate term to use because I only want some close friends to read it, lol” [ https://wants.blog/2024/05/09/i-think-publish-is-not-the-accurate-term-to-use-because-i-only-want-some-close-friends-to-read-it-lol ] ). Ironically, although this expression showed a great deal of sensitivity with respect to this sensitive issue, the teenager more or less blurted out the expression “only want” when what was actually meant may have been something more like “want only”. This seems reminiscent of last week’s post [1] insofar as language sometimes seems to be used without thinking what the expressed words actually mean. The way I interpret “only want” is something like wanting, but not needing or demanding; yet “want only [X]” I would interpret as wanting exactly X, no more, no less, not Y nor Z. Either way, in any case the teenager in question quite obviously lacks publicacy skills, since she seems to be unaware that Silicon Valley companies like Google or Facebook or whatever spyware used are constantly scouring the entire WWW and pore over every minute detail in order to collect information which might be helpful towards reaching their business goals of manipulating ever more people ever more effectively.

Likewise, one of my German friends (who could also be described as an “educated adult” or also as an “old white man” or indeed in innumerable other ways) expressed confusion about the slogan “The Whole World is Watching” (which I referenced in last week’s post [1] ). I thought I had been explicit enough, but I now have learned that (yet again) I was wrong to assume that something might be so-called “common knowledge” (see e.g. ““The Whole World is Watching”” [ https://squ.data.blog/2024/05/11/the-whole-world-is-watching ] ). What kills me, though, is the fact that my friend considered a Google search to be adequate to prove his case. In contrast, all the Google search proves is his own lack of publicacy skills! (LOL) 😀