How Information Sharing Has Changed: Part 2 The Public Sphere

In the second of two episodes of Risk! Engineers Talk Governance on How Information Sharing has Changed, due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss how the Public Sphere has evolved and what it ultimately means for SFAIRP.

Richard starts the chat outlining the work of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, tracing the journey of public discourse from coffee houses through to commercially-driven newspapers and media moguls, to today's podcast landscape. 

They discuss why they believe high-quality, discussion-based podcasts seem to be rising above the noise, how real-time expert conversation is replacing the slower editorial cycle of print media, and why helping people distinguish credible information has never been more important.

Richard and Gaye conclude the episode bringing the discussion back to SFAIRP (So Far As Is Reasonably Practicable) and how truly informed decisionmaking, whether in workplace health and safety or in a democracy, depends on robust, thoughtful public discussion rather than siloed, commercially driven narratives.

They also highlight how long it took R2A to move from target level of risk and safety to SFAIRP, and how they hope their podcast helps others better understand it.

If you’d like us to cover a specific topic or have any feedback we’d love to hear from you. Email admin@r2a.com.au.

For further information on Richard and Gaye’s consulting work with R2A, head to https://www.r2a.com.au, where you’ll also find their booklets (store) and a sign-up for their quarterly newsletter to keep informed of their latest news and events. 

Gaye is also founder of Australian women’s safety workwear company Apto PPE https://www.aptoppe.com.au.

Transcript

Megan (Producer) (00:00):

Welcome to Risk! Engineers Talk Governance. This is the second of two episodes where due diligence engineers Richard Robinson and Gaye Francis discuss how information sharing has changed with part 2's discussion on the public sphere.

(00:18):

We hope you enjoy the chat. If you do, please support our work by giving us a rating and subscribing on your favourite podcast platform. If you'd like more information on R2A, our newsletter and resources or have any feedback or topic ideas, please head to the website www.r2a.com.au.

Gaye Francis (00:39):

Hi Richard. Welcome to our podcast session today.

Richard Robinson (00:42):

Hi Gaye. This is part two, I believe.

Gaye Francis (00:43):

It is part two of our internet risk podcast that we're talking about. So today we're going to follow on from what we did last time and about SFAIRP internet managing internet risk and talk today about the public sphere and how information sharing has changed over time. You're going to give us a brief history.

Richard Robinson (01:07):

Well, not so much I'm going to give a brief history. I was just going to summarise. There was a fellow called Jurgen Habermas who died a couple of weeks ago, he's a German philosopher. And he was particularly concerned about the public sphere, but basically as a young bloke, he was in Nazi Germany and basically got conscripted at 16 to go and man an aircraft gun in 1945. But it wasn't until after that he actually had to look at the Holocaust sites and just realise what the total horror was. And he became a very influential, I guess, left wing, basically trying to make sure the German society didn't go to that place again. So he sort of well regarded. Now the concept he had was the public sphere and what he was pointing out, and maybe I just might just read a couple of bits here.

(01:51):

He was talking about the public sphere and the role of public sphere as in shaping Democratic administration society. In ideal form, the public sphere is made up of private people gathered together as a public and articulating needs of society with the state. And basically he's saying it's very much a sort of bourgeois middle class driven thing. And he said it basically sort of arrived in a practical sense when the coffee shop's in the 18th century where we really got together and basically gab-fest about the <issues> of the age, but basically because they were the middle class and they had the voting power, they were the people who basically decided and then sort of set the theme and what politicians would or couldn't do and basically therefore established what should be the case. Now the reason why this is kind of interesting because he then went on to say, well, look, what happened, Marastof started as a coffee shop arrangement and after a while all the broad sheets and things that people were printing off to enhance discussion basically turned into newspapers and that turned into a sort of capitalist driven market forces sort of thing where in the end the editor could actually decide who got elected and who didn't, depending on what editorials were written and things like that. But it emphasised that the whole process, the public fear emphasised that the newspaper should preferably be independent and give different points of view so that the larger society could decide what it is they wanted to do and how they wanted to achieve it.

(03:06):

Now obviously what happened is the internet, COVID turned up and kind of busted this because nobody's reading newspapers anymore. And all the podcasts have sort of waxed powerfully. But we've sort of noticed partly because the fact that our podcasts has become more influential, which to say is a complete source of astonishment to both of us is an understatement.

Gaye Francis (03:28):

That's kind - influential. More, popular?

Richard Robinson (03:31):

More popular. But what I've observed was you see what's actually been happening. And you see, a whole lot of podcasters turned up, some who had more intellectual horsepower than others. But some of those who have less intellectual horsepower, actually they're fading because they're losing their clicks. And I don't know if it's because the algorithm changed or because really the thing is just sorting itself out. But the ones who are sort of sustaining, at least the ones I obviously listen to, are actually fairly high horsepower from what I can tell. Now, I didn't actually realise til I mentioned (last episode) this Patrick Boyle character and he turned out to be a professor and a former hedge fund manager, a bunch of different things. And he was the one I was telling you about who sort of was commenting that he speaks perfect English because he's Irish and everybody else has a strange accent.

Gaye Francis (04:20):

Only an Irishman could say that.

Richard Robinson (04:23):

An Irishman could say that. But the points he were making were actually quite profound, I thought. And then he was going on about the impact of the, because he was a hedge fund and he was looking at the impact of the war. I mean, one of the other points he made in passing was the oil shortage is going to affect the Scottish pretty severely, because as a population they've evolved to live on fried food, deep fried food, which I thought was a bit tough.

Gaye Francis (04:48):

Very tough, very tough.

Richard Robinson (04:50):

But he's obviously a very sharp cookie. Now, what I've observed is that the internet ones that seem to be surviving are the people and who are actually ... It's not so much individual presenters. You listen to an individual presenter and I find you get sick of it pretty fast. What you want are the people who are actually talking together that you sort of get familiar to.

Gaye Francis (05:09):

Discussion.

Richard Robinson (05:10):

Discussion. And I actually suspect that's what, because I don't know what you're going to say next any more than you know what I'm going to say next.

Gaye Francis (05:17):

That is very true, Richard.

Richard Robinson (05:19):

But then you listen to people on international politics from Australia vernacular. You see Hugh White talking with Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute. And when those two are talking about politics and the way American politics affect Australia, would you really think that America would come to Australia's defense and in the changing world, what does Australia have to do? And yes, we've gone inside free trade agreements last week with the European Union as well as Canada, because (their PM) Carney was out here, both the European president and the Carney addressed the Australian Parliament in the last month or so. The whole thing, the world is really changing fast. And these authoritative podcasters that are actually having discussions are the ones that seem to be winning the day.

Gaye Francis (06:04):

So do you think that comes back to what we're talking about, the public sphere and how information is shared? So it's that discussion?

Richard Robinson (06:12):

Yeah. And it's moving away from ... Because remember, starting the coffee houses, according to Jurgen, and it's moved to the newspapers commercially driven, run by media moguls, Murdoch and the other families and things like that.

Gaye Francis (06:25):

They're only printing what they think people want to hear.

Richard Robinson (06:27):

Yeah. But more than that, they try to then take over the blog sphere and the YouTube sphere, the podcast sphere. But I think people are actually starting to move away from that. And certainly people like me, I don't listen to some particular ... I'm listening to ... Let's find somebody who knows what they're talking about and listen to them in discussion. And I find that to be a lot more useful. Now, I may be an optimist here, but if you actually think that's the way the world is going, where that discussion used to be, I mean, you read an editorial in the newspaper. I can remember hopping on a train and buying the newspaper at the station and reading it on the train. That's what I used to do. I used to come and talk to you about it.

Gaye Francis (07:04):

You did.

Richard Robinson (07:06):

And I can't do that anymore. I'd sometimes swap between papers because I wanted different points of view or I knew different journalists had different attitudes. In effect, what I was doing is reading a discussion, but it's slow because it's in paper and word.

Gaye Francis (07:17):

Yeah, right.

Richard Robinson (07:18):

Now when you listen to these guys...

Gaye Francis (07:19):

It's five or 10 minutes.

Richard Robinson (07:21):

It's five or 10 minutes and they're talking about real time events far faster than these newspaper people can keep up with it. Now, I'm not saying that you wouldn't still want to read something like The Atlantic or The Economist or something like that because they've actually got people writing something who seriously think about it, but they're not the people sitting online writing it. They're the people get the ideas, put an article together and then publish it. So I think the world's changed. That's certainly the case. And you're fretting about your kids because at the moment they're just taking information from anywhere and all information's equal if it comes from the internet, right?

Gaye Francis (07:56):

Correct. They don't know how to <distinguish> between it.

Richard Robinson (07:58):

They have to distinguish between it. But I can remember quite distinctly thinking as a student many, many years ago, that if I had the choice between reading Plato or listening to Pato Live, I would have listened to Plato live, but you couldn't do it.

Gaye Francis (08:11):

You were a different type of person growing up, Richard. I think we can all agree with that. But if we bring it back to the stuff that we do in that SFAIRP realm, and that moral imperative, are we saying that that's trying to create this public vision and a societal vision rather than individuals just doing their own thing and thinking in silos.

Richard Robinson (08:35):

That's correct. I mean, if you talk about the public sphere where you're at gab-festing in a coffee shop and they're mostly blokes doing it anyway, to media moguls running the show, which I got a funny feeling a lot of us didn't think was the particularly best option that we could have to competent...

Gaye Francis (08:52):

People having discussions.

Richard Robinson (08:53):

Real time discussions and it's discussions. I mean, you listen to the different people and you do se them popping up now is that the people who actually make sense are getting interviewed by other people's blogs. I observe that Hugh White gets interviewed by different people and you notice that fellow I was talking about Patrick Boyle, I've noticed him getting interviewed because obviously he knows what he's talking about. So if you're a serious podcaster, the only people you want to talk to are people who actually have competent views and you can have a competent discussion and you can actually have a disagreement, but it's a disagreement that's actually intellectually thought through. So if you're talking about having a good resolution to complicated issues, you've got the best chance I think you can in real time faster with the new internet system and you can have an argument.

(09:46):

I mean, one of the problems with, we had the problem with people, the American president just keeps typing away things every night and you've got no idea what's going on and all sorts of things, but then you hear a competent discussion about this, that, and what's going on and all of a sudden you can make sense of it, which otherwise you couldn't do. Now, whether that's helpful or not, I don't know. But the optimist in me is saying, yeah, maybe it's not as bad as everybody thinks. And maybe it's not as bad for your kids as everybody thinks because if they become clear which ones are the ones worth listening to that do encourage the public sphere (and) competent information.

Gaye Francis (10:22):

To make informed decisions.

Richard Robinson (10:25):

To make competent, informed decisions, which is what you want. Democracy fails if you don't have the competence middle class, as it were, having this informed decision making.

Gaye Francis (10:39):

And I think we've talked to podcasts about informed decision making and that's the basis of SFAIRP, isn't it?

Richard Robinson (10:45):

In effect, yes. And that you thought through all the options in the circumstances. I mean, that was when we invited the professor of law and public policy from Cambridge out, David Howarth, and he was saying the lawyers and the engineers are very much aligned. You've got a problem or you want to do something, what are the options and in the circumstances which is the best way forward? Isn't that what an election is?

Gaye Francis (11:05):

Supposed to be, yes.

Richard Robinson (11:06):

Supposed to be.

Gaye Francis (11:08):

So Richard, in this podcast, there was a lot of information that my little brain's been ticking over and my summary of it is that you think R2A have really moved into that thought leadership process now again of the due diligence space and the WHS legislation in a SFAIRP sense and that SFAIRP is really encouraging that moral imperative to look at the community as a whole and do the best for the community in a public sense rather than looking at it from a commercial and individual silo sense.

Richard Robinson (11:44):

That's right. SFAIRP has moved into the public sphere and it's taking people like us to actually discuss it and so that everyone understands it.

Gaye Francis (11:50):

Understands what it is. Because it's complex.

Richard Robinson (11:54):

Well, any moral imperative tends to create difficulties for society.

Gaye Francis (12:00):

Yeah. And so you need to have these robust discussions to be able to go forward and get those best outcomes that we're hoping to get.

Richard Robinson (12:07):

Well, you know how long it took us to move from that sort of target level of risk and safety to the SFAIRP side of things. And it took us the best part of 20 years. Now that transition, I mean, we're in the business. I mean, we live and breathe this stuff. So if it was hard for us, just imagine how hard it is for ordinary people just doing going with the ordinary lives, it is to get up to speed in these things. It's very difficult.

Gaye Francis (12:30):

So I think keeping those two things in mind, look at all the things that you can do and what's reasonable in the circumstances, but with that holistic community and public context, you hopefully get the best outcomes. Thanks for joining us today and we'll see you next time.

Richard Robinson (12:48):

Thanks, Gaye.