Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction

TLDR

Social media reshape public life by altering the architecture of publicness, blending audiences, and demanding new control mechanisms as users navigate blurred boundaries and shifting contexts. The article examines how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs audiences and publics, and changes the nature of public engagement.

Abstract

Social media complicate the very nature of public life. In this article, we consider how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs 'audiences' and publics, and alters what it means to engage in public life. The nature of publicness online is shaped by the architecture and affordances of social media, but also by people's social contexts, identities, and practices. Navigating socially mediated publicness requires new mechanisms of control and new skills. Understanding socially-mediated publicness is an ever-shifting process throughout which people juggle blurred boundaries, multi-layered audiences, individual attributes, the specifics of the systems they use, and the contexts of their use.