Prof. Chris Raffensperger

Professor of History and Chair of the Department
Kenneth E. Wray Chair in the Humanities
Director, Ermarth Institute for the Public Humanities
Medieval Europe, Russia, Ukraine

When I am teaching, I often reach for an analogy to try to compare something relatively obscure in history to something known by my students. In recent years this has become more difficult as I find that there is little common ground that we share; not just because I am old, but because even amongst the students themselves there is little that is common knowledge. 

If I were talking to people of about my age, I could say things that would trigger a predictable response based on our shared set of information, usually from media of various sorts. I could say (and have), “You’ve been missing a lot of work lately” and expect that the other person would answer, “I wouldn’t say I’ve been missing it!” (It's a quote from the movie "Office Space.")

With Dr. Julius Bailey, a philosophy professor at Wittenberg, I share a love of 90s hip hop and so I have been known to drop quotations on him with regularity. Recently I said that someone from Englewood was “up to no good” – a quote from Dr. Dre referring to Inglewood, California, not Ohio. Or when I had a book editor named Bonita and I told this to Dr. Bailey, who immediately said, “You didn’t.” and I confessed that I had. In fact, I emailed her and said “Hey, Bonita, nice to meet ya.” It's a line from A Tribe Called Quest song, though I demurred from continuing with other lyrics about Bonita Applebum.

A shared cultural experience is not just for those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s. Christianity provided a shared experience for so many people in the United States, and even more in Europe such that people could use quotes from the Bible with ease and expect them to be understood. Words and phrases like “pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6) or a shibboleth (Judges 12:6) used to be part of common knowledge, though I suspect that they are largely on their way out these days.

In medieval Scandinavia the shared collection of folk tales was so well known that they became the basis for kennings – a shorthand reference to an item from a wider body of knowledge. Gold could be called “Sif’s hair” and people knew that because they knew the story where the goddess Sif had her hair cut off by Loki and the dwarfs made her new hair of finely spun gold.

The fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm maintained a similar commonality, and still do, for the ones that have been adapted to cartoons and children’s books. Others, such as the story which spawned the expression “throw the baby out with the bath water” have fallen by the wayside, as I learned recently in class.

Common knowledge and shared experiences create bonds between people; even people from different regions of the country, who have had different life experiences. What is common now? What will connect you as a college student to someone who is in Arizona, Alabama, or Maine? Is it the same TikTok videos, YouTube channels, or is there anything?

Prof. Ross Jackson

Associate Professor of Business & Economics
Program Director, Master of Science in Analytics
Management

Collaboration produces several benefits. Athletes and businesspeople know this insight well, as teamwork is an essential component of success in those contexts. Among the major benefits of collaboration is that one is no longer constrained by the limits of one’s own thinking and imagination. It certainly has been for me, in my collaborations with Dr. Raffensperger. It was his insight that a recurring, subtextual theme of our articles this semester has been the loss of common knowledge in our society. And it was his suggestion that we explore this topic more directly for our culminating article. So here we are.

Exploring the lack of common knowledge in our society with any degree of coherence requires that we first define what it meant by the phrase. Though somewhat paradoxically, having to define common knowledge suggests that the concept itself is not part of our common knowledge. One can always delight in such aspects of the human condition. For our purposes here, common knowledge can be understood as any information which is generally known by most people in society. Such common knowledge could include widely accepted facts, key historical dates, or popular, cultural information. For those engaged in academics, common knowledge does not require a citation in research. Common knowledge is known and accepted as true, or at least, when known to be false, it functions as true in our collective mythology.

Through the exploration of sitcoms in the 1970’s and music in the 1980’s, a loss of common knowledge in our society was identified. We no longer watch or listen to the same things at the same time. Broadcast, like the telegraph, isn’t dead yet, but its social relevance has been diminished greatly. There is potential benefit in understanding how this happened and its consequence.

From an economic perspective, there is debate about the degree to which markets respond to or create demand. Do technological gadgets come into existence to fulfill human needs, or do our desires change in response to what is available? Our society has a longstanding focus on the individual. Products designed for the individualization of experience are often profitable. This isn’t new. Transistor radios in the 1960’s allowed for the individual transportation of radio, which was extended further in the 1980’s with the Sony Walkman, and then with streaming, as we discussed. The allure of individual choice is seductive. The desirability of having access to whatever one wants, whenever one wants it, seems self-evident. If its consequences were constrained to only entertainment, there wouldn’t be much to critique.

However, the radical individualization of entertainment has corresponded with an erosion of our repository of common knowledge. We are increasingly living in our own worlds. The promise of individualized entertainment has occurred along with a growing sense of isolation. This is not to imply that this is the cause, only to suggest that it does nothing to help the situation. Without a foundation of common knowledge, a society is little more than a collection of individuals.

All is not lost. There are still pockets of shared experience within our society. Sports are one of a few unifying points of cultural focus. If a game is to be watched, it almost always is watched while it is occurring. People tend to experience it together, and then discuss aspects of the occurrence as a form of common knowledge. For us here, Wittenberg provides us shared experiences and community that nurture the development of common knowledge. I am becoming ever more aware of how increasing rare and valuable this is in our society. I appreciate that Dr. Raffensperger identified this concern as something we were confronting indirectly. I appreciate that along the Wittenberg Way, students, faculty, and staff are able to pursue individual passions in an environment that sustains and enhances our common knowledge. This is not only uncommon, but also, truly special.