Hamerton, Christopher (2022) The shaping of opinion: literacy, media, and folk devils in eighteenth-century London. In, Devilry, Deviance, and Public Sphere: The Social Discovery of Moral Panic in Eighteenth Century London. 1st ed. London. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 47-80. (doi:10.1007/978-3-031-14883-5_3).
Abstract
This chapter investigates the key theme of mass media, charting the birth of what Habermas referred to as the public sphere, a development which ushered in a period of intense public opinion and moral consciousness, and subsequent moral entrepreneurship. Key to this analysis is the historical context of public literacy, alongside consideration of media availability and access for the poor and illiterate. The struggle and discourse over oral culture and literacy are discussed, again with reference to contemporary literature, as is the growing significance of visual imagery to the formation of a public consensus of morality. The rapid development of news media is covered through examination of the changes that saw what might be described as the popular press transformed into the watchman press as the century evolved.
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