"The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible".(Arendt) Your thoughts?

ChatGPT said:

Arendt’s image of the vanished table is a powerful way to grasp what she means by the “public realm” as more than just a crowd or a set of faces—but the space that holds us in relation to one another, mediates our distance, and makes genuine plurality possible. In a properly functioning public world, I can see you across the table, hear you speak, and yet we remain distinct—our individuality framed and bounded by the common world between us.

When that world vanishes:

• Separation and Relation Collide. Two people face each other with nothing in between—but also nothing that connects. There is no shared context, no “in‑between” to carry conversation, to frame disagreement, to support empathy.

• Mass Society’s Disorientation. It’s not simply that there are too many of us; it’s that the architecture of our shared life—rituals, institutions, public spaces, narratives—has been eroded or flattened. We see each other, but we cannot speak each other into being.

• The Spiritualistic Séance. In that conjuring trick, the table disappears, leaving participants stranded: like spirits without a medium, they are present but unable to commune. Modern mass media and algorithmic feeds can feel the same way—connecting us visually or emotionally, yet severing the very channels of mutual transformation.

• Removal of Mediation as Harm. Just as deinstitutionalization without adequate alternative infrastructures can leave individuals unmoored, so a public realm stripped of its sustaining structures leaves us all unmoored in relation.

• Disintegration of Transindividuation. Without that “table” of shared symbolic life—public rituals, civic spaces, narrative forms—we lose the very process by which collective and individual identities are co‑shaped.