From the introduction:
“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.”
The articles are open access. The introduction offers an overview of the individual articles ans well as a sound conceptualization of “socially mediated publicness”
- “Socially Mediated Publicness: An Introduction” by Nancy Baym and danah boyd
- “Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience” by Eden Litt
- “Facework on Facebook: The Online Publicness of Juvenile Delinquents and Youths-at-Risk” by Sun Sun Lim, Shobha Vadrevu, Yoke Hian Chan & Iccha Basnyat
- “The Digital Storyteller’s Stage: Queer Everyday Activists Negotiating Privacy and Publicness” by Sonja Vivienne & Jean Burgess
- “‘There Isn’t Wifi in Heaven!’ Negotiating Visibility on Facebook Memorial Pages”by Alice Marwick & Nicole B. Ellison
- “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public” by Anastasia Salter & Bridget Blodgett
- “Secretly Political: Civic Engagement in Online Publics in Kazakhstan” by Irina Shklovski & Bjarki Valtysson
I found Eden Litt’s article on “the imagined audience” particularly interesting. When I wrote my PhD thesis on the design of educational resources, I interviewed developers of educational Web portals and was intrigued by the different ways they conceptualized their target groups and how information on the actual audience informed the “imagined audience”.
Litt, E. (2012): Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56:3, 330-345
- “The imagined audience is the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating, our audience.” (331)
- “mere imagined audience can be just as influential as the actual audience in determining behavior” (331)
- “During face-to-face settings, and even some one-to-one mediated communication, people typically interact with small and explicit audiences relying more on who they can
- see or hear in the actual audience, rather than their imagination. However, characteristics of social media platforms have altered the size, composition, boundaries,
- accessibility, and cue availability of our communication partners during everyday interactions making it nearly impossible to determine the actual audience.” (332)
- “Without being able to know the actual audience, social media users create and attend to an imagined audience for their everyday interactions.” (333)
- In the conclusion, Litt draws attention to techniques for conceptualizing the audience that could be leveraged for social media profiles:
- “Some industries have spent lots of time and money attempting to understand who is on the other side of the screen. While not all of these strategies may be economically feasible nor time efficient for everyday social media users, such as focus groups, there are many other industry-learned strategies that people may be underutilizing. For example, Berkenkotter (1981) identified that successful publishing scholars were much more likely to ‘‘internalize’’ the audience than a layman or student writer (p. 395). These scholars were constantly asking themselves what the reader might think or ask. Likewise, some in the Web design industry create ‘‘personas’’ or fictionalized individuals based on empirical research to help them think realistically about their users beyond ‘‘users’’ (Massanari, 2010). One potential strategy then is to focus on making users more cognizant of their imagined audience and teaching them techniques to help them gain more insight on the make-up of their potential audience. This might include, for example, teaching users to take advantage of a site’s analytics functionality or educating users on understanding and reviewing their privacy settings before posting.” (342)
