For tomorrow we were going to read an article by Dominique Mehl titled, "The Public on the Television Screen: Towards a Public Sphere of Exhibition." However, since I pushed back the due date for the final draft of your paper, I decided not to give you the reading; my hope was that instead of reading you would spend this time doing what Ballenger terms "preparing the final manuscript" (211). Nonetheless, I think that any examination of the public sphere, especially any discussion that attempts to understand the essay's relationship to the public, needs to include the work of Mehl. If you are interested in reading the article you can click here.If you are not interested in reading the article, I summarize it below:

Mehl's thesis is most clearly stated at the end of her piece when she says, "Here [on the twenty-first century television screen] public discussion is sustained by private experience; learned arguments are replaced by the recounting of life histories; expression is as important as formulation; the witness takes the place to the expert; exhibition or display rather than demonstration takes pride" (27). What Mehl means in this quote is that television does not focus on rational arguments made by people like sociologists, historians, judges, or journalists; instead the lives of average people, which are given the status of arguments, are put on display for public consumption (22). The public empathizes with these "average people," who Mehl refers to as "witnesses," because they are either representative of the mass public (the average person) or representative of a group (couples in a sexless marriage, alcoholics, teenage mothers). If the audience is able to identify with the witness (perhaps they think that their marriage might be in trouble, were close to becoming a teenage mother, or have issues with addiction in a different form) then the rhetoric jumps from "me" to "us." The audience sees themselves as a part of the same public as the witness.

Mehl explores four interesting effects of this type of public discussion:

1. The loss of the expert: Since we are getting our information from the personal narratives of private individuals, we have little need for those who "devote their time to making presentation of their knowledge, involving their expertise, defending their ideas and making the case for their positions" (24). Mehl argues that these people take secondary roles to the witness. Further, she argues that since we are so focused on the internal, personal aspects of these arguments that the only experts who are really able to thrive in this environment are psychologists and pseudo-psychologists (think about Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, and Maury). 
2. It is nearly impossible to argue against the witness: In the classical understanding of the public sphere, ideas, opinions, arguments, and ideologies confronted each other constantly. However, since the public sphere of personal experiences is based on (supposedly) genuine accounts, then it becomes difficult to refute these stories. Mehl shows that we lose rational argument to personalized stories; "'This is what I live' takes the place of 'This is what I think...'" (25).
3. These programs lead to the emergence of a particularly active public: Though there is little discussion about these personal experiences on the shows, the audience has a tendency to discuss the issues on their own after they turn off the television screen. In the workplace, the home, the playground, the nail salon, the gym, and an indefinite amount of other social spaces, the audience of the witness-based television program argues over the validity what the witness has said. Generally, the audience supports or refutes the values and decisions they have heard on television. Mehl argues that since there is not an absolute social institution forming our identities for us, these discussions of other's personal issues are one of the ways that we form our own identities. 
4. The private/public sphere: Mehl argues that understanding public and private as separate spheres with distinct boarders is inherently flawed. Instead, she says that in the twenty-first century we should see publicness as processes by which people attempt to keep some things open and other things intimate. For Mehl, in the twenty-first century what an individual chooses to keep private and what one wants to keep intimate are completely up to his/her discretion.

I could fill this post with videos from news shows titled "Inside a Sexless Marriage," "Mom Left Job and Fell Into Alcoholism,"  or promotional clips for Teen Mom 2; however, I think that you are all familiar with these types of programs.

My questions to you are these: Do you believe that "exhibition" is the new form of public discourse? Is this a good thing, a bad thing, or a mute point? Finally, if Mehl's model is how the public now communicates should experts/academics/intellectuals embrace this mode of discussion, push against it, or is there another option?