New ICTs and the Problem of ‘Publicness’

Abstract

Global developments and the appearance of new devices in information and communication technology have radically modified people's communicative practices and their information-handling behaviours, while both scientific and lay representations of communications and communicative situations have also changed, necessitating the elaboration of a complex theory of communications. The article attempts to give an analytical description of the underlying structure of the field of all forms of communications, using structuring semantic oppositions that explain the norms and strategies that govern people's communicative behaviour. The semantic dichotomies public/private, public/non-public, direct/ mediated build a framework wherein each field is defined according to these oppositions. They help to understand how speakers attempt to place themselves, their partners and their communicative acts and how they construct their communications in this structured space. The semantic oppositions discussed in this article constitute one aspect of a complex theory of communications that covers all forms of communication from personal to mass media and takes into consideration the existence of overlapping public spheres as well as attempting to explain people's communicative behaviours in terms of intentions and success, norms and strategies.

Private and public in mass media communication: From letters to the editor to online commentaries

“…While the first aspect is lost when a private topic is increasingly discussed in public settings, it is still private in the second sense. When analyzing blends between private and public it is therefore important to distinguish clearly between the two levels of the public accessibility of the communicative event and the private nature of the topic of the conversation (Weintraub 1997;Heller 2006;Dürscheid 2007). Weintraub (1997: 5) argues that in all fields in which the public/private distinction is used, two different underlying criteria characterize the public and the private: visibility and collectivity (see As Dürscheid points out, to classify recreational online chat as private does not mean that only private topics are discussed.…”

“…Dürscheid also notes the concomitant differences in the language used in these situations: There seems to be a tendency for private communication in public settings to be realized in rather informal language, especially in the case of digital media (2007: 37-38). Heller (2006) uses the terms "public"/"private" to refer to the content dimension and the terms "public"/"non-public" to refer to the accessibility dimension. She also builds the dimension of the medium into her model, making it three dimensional (see figure 1).…”

Crossing Public-Private and Personal-Professional Boundaries

“…Distinguishing among informational, psychological, and social privacy, Krämer and Haferkamp (2011) discussed how self-presentation goals conflict with privacy goals, why all strategies for balancing these goals have disadvantages, and what social media features complicate the situation. Contrasting the word public in the sense of accessible and public in the sense of communal, Heller (2006) used three sets of semantic oppositions to model communication behavior in mediated and nonmediated contexts. Taking an economic perspective, Papacharissi and Gibson (2011) showed how personal-private information becomes a commodity traded to social media sites that want to make that information public.…”

Situational transformations

“…There is a need for a more nuanced view of the public/private distinction, as discussed by Heller (2006) and Landert & Jucker (2011). The latter propose three scales along which texts can be situated with regard to this dichotomy: accessibility, contents and style.…”