Online Networked Publics

Digital technology and media have restructured publics as networked publics (Boyd, 2011). Especially in the web 2.0 – an ‘ensemble’ of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram etc. – publics are constructed through specific affordances and at the same time designed interactively in each communicative exchange through individual stylistic choices which are, nonetheless, oriented to community norms (Androutsopoulos 2014).

Messages in the web 2.0 manifest such norms of the community and therefore construct the members identities. Indeed, they foster mixed images of the self : ego-driven, but also communally oriented performances (Papacharissi, 2018) staging ‘Me-we’ identities (Burger, 2019) often contributing to the formation of affective publics (Papacharissi, 2015) or intimate publics (Cumiskey and Hjorth, 2017).

The annual workshop addresses the construction of networked publics from a variety of perspectives. It interrogates the ways in which networked audiences emerge in different social media sharing practices and examines the implications of their formation for identity construction, affect entextualization and circulation, and community-building.

Sharing is, here, understood as the main mode of online participation that incorporates notions of distribution, communication and interpersonal relations and that evokes the declared values of the sharing economy and the internet imaginary, including openness, trust, caring, and reciprocity (John, 2017).

The examination of different ways of constituting, developing and connecting (or disconnecting) networked audiences sheds light into the dynamics of participation, often traversing the online and offline, and raises important questions relating to the resignification of the public sphere and its associated notions of the ‘public’, the ‘social’, and the ‘commons’ (Fuchs 2014).

References

Androutsopoulos, J. (2014). Languaging when contexts collapse: Audience design in social networking. Discourse, Context & Media 4-5: 62-73.

Boyd, D. (2011). Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Papacharissi, Z. (ed.) Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites. New York: Routledge, pp. 39-58.

Burger, M. (2019). Introduction : Se mettre en scène dans les sphères publiques en ligne. In Burger, M. (ed.) La communication digitale, vol. 2. Cahiers de l’ILSL 59: 3-19.

Cumiskey, K.M. and L. Hjorth (2017). Haunting Hands. Mobile Media Practices and Loss. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fuchs, C. (2014). Social media. A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.

John, N. (2017). The Age of Sharing. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.