Reconfiguring ‘the’ Public Sphere as a Network of Polity, Topic, and Group Publics

The final (yay, made it!) session at this ICA 2024 conference starts with the wonderful Wiebke Loosen, whose work is interested in the reconfiguration of the public sphere; she points out that even two decades ago Peter Dahlgren already pointed out that ‘the’ public sphere is actually plural, and consists of a wide range of various overlapping publics that are interconnected and networked in various ways.

This represents a refiguration of public communication, which draws on relational and process sociology that emphasises the relational structures of the social world and the dynamics in and between these relations. This also signals a shift in the social figurations that define public communication. Publics in this should be seen as a normatively open concept that is empirically descriptive.

Publics then are social domains that are communicatively constructed and can be analysed as communicative figurations. They come with three features: actor constellations (who is involved?), frames of relevance (what is the public about?), and communicative practices (how is the public constructed?).

From this emerge three major types of publics: polity publics (comprised of all individuals within a specific geographic area, and representing people’s desire to remain informed about developments within their area); topic publics (related to preferences about specific interests and expertises, and mainly related to special interest media); and group publics (based on specific aspects of an individual’s identity, therefore engendering a strong sense of belonging amongst participants). These different types of publics can be nested, hybrid, and are a concern of society-wide discourse.

What does this framework enable us to do, then? The structural change in the actor constellations, practices, and frames of relevance that characterise these various publics can be examined by focussing on actors and practices, rather than content and topics; one field of application may be for instance in the study of pioneer journalists and their relationships with audiences. What new power balances emerge here; what new agility in public communication and its forms does this enable; and what new relevancies does this generate for society and its publics?