In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey tries to distinguish between transactions that are private and those that are public. Private transactions have no significant effect on people who aren’t involved with the transaction. Public transactions have consequences that have a significant but indirect effect on people who aren’t a party to the transaction itself. When people realize that they’re being affected by these indirect consequences, they try to find some way to manage them, and that’s how governments form. (I’m shorthanding this a bit. Dewey takes a couple of chapters to set up this point, and that’s not entirely because of his occasional difficulties in making his point clear.)
I decided that a good way to illustrate this distinction was to, well, illustrate it. I asked my students to imagine that I was going to order a new PC from Dell (not likely any time soon), and to describe whose lives would be affected by this decision. The obvious starting place was that Dell and I would be affected, so I put marks on the board to indicate those two parties. Then we started digging. How is the computer going to get to me? Well, someone has to ship it, they said. So I drew a road connecting Dell and me, and a crude UPS truck. Who’s going to get affected by that truck? Neighbors who will be affected by smog and noise pollution, perhaps. So little exhaust clouds and houses got added near the truck. Where are the parts of the computer coming from? Well, they’re being manufactured in Asia, so I drew factories on the far side of the board, and then a boat taking the components to Dell in Texas. And so on and so on.
Now, despite the fact that my drawing was, quite frankly, terrible, I think this exercise was worthwhile. The students seemed to have fun thinking up all sorts of connections, and when we were done we had a framework to talk about how all of these ripple effects are shaped and regulated in our society. I may need to hit my sister up for some art lessons, but there’s definitely something for me to take away here in terms of how to get a point across.