Laypeople

Modern society invites participation from laypeople in a range of spheres. As voters, consumers, media users, patients, or students, people are allowed, and indeed encouraged, to confront experts with their desires, worries, or complaints. But in order to be able to enter into a genuine dialogue with these experts, laypeople seem to need to actively inform themselves, develop a certain amount of expertise of their own. In this book, Fran Osrečki places such assumptions on their head, arguing that in modern societies, laypeople have most power when they are uninformed, act unpredictably and inconsistently. Their non-knowledge is their most important resource. Laypeople form an unknown audience, and as such, they play an important role in our functionally differentiated contemporary society.