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puter users and those who do not have access to ICT technologies.
It should have increased ‘public knowledge’, but it is not a mystery
– and the latest global economical and political events testify it –
that in terms of functioning of public administration (justice,
econo my, politics, business, or finance), today we do not know
much more than in the past. As the audience is submitted to a con-
stant flow of information, surprisingly the public debate tends to
fade away. Actually, according to Lasch, it is public debate, indeed,
which gives the basis for a real democracy. “What democracy
requires is vigorous public debate, not information. Of course, it
needs information too, but the kind of information it needs can be
generated only by debate.”33 Nowadays, public debate tends to
decline as it is induced by the same groups of power who exert
great control over the media, and because the news produced by the
media is mostly unreliable or exempt from control. Moreover, the
media process being unidirectional (it goes from the source to the
public), it lacks a fundamental issue: the public itself is prevented
from verifying information and asking questions which can orien-
tate the debate. “We do not know what we need to know until we
ask the right questions, and we can identify the right questions
only by subjecting our own ideas about the world to the test of a
public controversy.”34
Despite commentators such as Noam Chomsky and Naomi
Klein, at present the ‘universal’ intellectuals, responsible for
speaking for the whole of society, intellectuals like, for instance,
Pasolini was, are less and less common. Thus the question is not
whether a social criticism could be related to a universal sphere.
The question is: Does the possibility of a social criticism of any
kind still exist? On this subject Pasolini and Lasch share a com-
mon point of view related to language. According to Pasolini, the
adherence of society to the so-called consumerist centre implies
that “verbal language is entirely reduced to communication lan-
guage, with an enormous impoverishment of expressiveness”,35
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33 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites, pp. 162–163.
34 Ibid, p. 163.
35 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, p. 54.
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