Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications

Networked publics must be understood in terms of “publics,” a contested and messy term with multiple meanings that is used across different disciplines to signal different concepts. One approach is to construct “public” as a collection of people who share “a common understanding of the world, a shared identity, a claim to inclusiveness, a consensus regarding the collective interest” (Livingstone, 2005, p. 9). In this sense, a public may refer to a local collection of people (e.g., one’s peers) or a much broader collection of people (e.g., members of a nation-state). Those invested in the civic functioning of publics often concern themselves with the potential accessibility of spaces and information to wide…