This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

How insurgencies—enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere—have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, Martin Gurri saw it coming. Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age: government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public is now available in an updated edition, which includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of Brexit. The book concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.

Abstract: In this new study of high school-aged youth in the early 70's, the author reveals subtle yet significant changes in the style of deviance in adolescent culture. The argument is made that a new peer-group pluralism emerged from the 60's which is characterized by a deviance defined less by persistent violations of the law than by disengagement from traditional images of success and civic responsiblity. This work is based on an ethnographic study of six communities located in a midwestern agricultural and industrial state. This study will be of interest to individuals involved in the fields of adolescence, education, delinquency and deviance, community life, and the texture of life and values among high school youth.