By Avery<\/a><\/span> <\/p>\n

In his discussion of the flourishing of the United States postal system, John makes a compelling makes the argument that this new information infrastructure resulted in a \u201cdemocratization of the public sphere\u201d (68). Normally I would be inclined to start picking apart his argument by pointing out the surviving power dynamics that leave certain voices on the sideline, but really I’d only be participating in an equally reductive form of history.<\/p>\n

I was inspired by our discussion of runaway ads and American Indian literacy to restore the nuance in how I think about this period in United States history. Though the boundaries of the \u201cpublic sphere\u201d were not suddenly dissolved into a perfectly democratic Utopia (as Sherwood articulates<\/a>, \u201cthe European consciousness was not prepared to fully accept natives into their societies\u201d), there is great merit in the argument that the newly bolstered mail system created more opportunities for organization and resistance in marginalized communities.<\/p>\n

John brings up Jackson’s censorship of Southern slave-related mailings. Now, it’s debatable whether or not Southerners count as a \u201cmarginalized\u201d group, but certainly Jackson’s impulse to censor shows that he felt less in control of information flow that he would like. When paired with Round<\/a>‘s survey of American Indian persons’ subversive use of literature and newspapers, John’s discussion of Jackson’s censorship evidences John’s view that an expanding physical postal infrastructure also led to an expanding discursive field.<\/p>\n

One way to think about the connection between the structure and function of American postal infrastructure is to apply network analysis principles (I know, here she goes again\u2026). Increased postal infrastructure resulted in a more complex postal information network; there were suddenly more nodes (post offices) and more efficient paths among them (postal routes). One of the most interesting ideas in network analysis is the \u201cstrength of weak ties\u201d hypothesis posited by Granovetter<\/a>. Granovetter proved that novel information tends to come from nodes that are not well-connected to the network (weakly tied to other nodes). The explosion of post offices in the late 18^{th<\/sup> and early 19th<\/sup> century United States gave far-off communities a connection to the central network. This resulted in more new information circulating in the network as a whole.<\/p>\n}

This networked perspective does not credit the United States with a sudden epiphany of perfect democracy; instead it explains the information landscape as one where more new information was able to enter the public sphere. To me, this approach strikes the balance between a Utopian view and a view that ignores spaces of marginalized communities’ resistance.<\/p>\n

<\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a>  <\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Avery In his discussion of the flourishing of the United States postal system, John makes a compelling makes the argument that this new information infrastructure resulted in a \u201cdemocratization of the public sphere\u201d (68). Normally I would be inclined to start picking apart his argument by pointing out the surviving power dynamics that leave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-private","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his245\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}