Issue Spatiality: A Conceptual Framework for the Role of Space in Public Discourses

Public spheres research has traditionally sidestepped questions of space by focusing on a priori delineated political territories, most prominently national public spheres. While this approach has always lacked nuance, it has become acutely insufficient nowadays, as digital communication technologies easily enable a host of heterogeneous actors to draw public attention to spaces and places at any scale, and communicatively connect places anywhere in the world. This conceptual article argues that communication scholars need to reconsider the spaces embedded in the content of public discourses. Drawing on the notion of issue publics, it understands the public definition of issues as inextricably linked to the places that are communicatively associated with them, causing issue spaces to emerge. The issue space is constructed through place-naming whenever public actors reference places in the context of issues. The article develops issue spatiality as an analytical framework to understand the role of place and space in public discourse. It discusses how issue spatiality enables a better understanding of the increasingly complex scales of public communication, and outlines several dimensions of issue spatiality. Drawing on communication infrastructure literature, it proposes socio-spatial inequalities of communicative resources as important predictors of issue spatiality, along with the habits of professional communicators, and local problem properties. Gazetteers and mapping techniques are introduced as methodological interventions required for the empirical use of issue spatiality.

Rethinking Audience Fragmentation Using a Theory of News Reading Publics: Online India as a Case Study

Scholarly work that seeks to theorize about fragmentation of media audiences has largely been restricted to the experiences of advanced democracies in the west. This has resulted in a preponderance of research endeavors that have sought to understand this phenomenon through ideas that are pertinent, perhaps solely to those contexts, and not as applicable outside, particularly in the Global South. This has potentially limited our imagination into various other ways in which audience fragmentation can manifest in these often-overlooked countries. In this paper, I use the case of online India as an example to offer a theoretical framework – that of news reading publics – for understanding audience fragmentation as a more global socio-political phenomenon that allows for rigorous comparative research, without being restrictive in scope. I draw from existing theories in communication and related disciplines and show how such a framework can be situated within existing social science theory. I argue that this framework should make us think of audience fragmentation in western contexts to be special cases of a more general model. I also show how network analysis can be used as a context-agnostic tool for identifying news reading publics and demonstrate the utility of such a method in complementing this theoretical framework. Finally, I discuss potential future research directions that this framework generates.Keywords: news consumption, online news, uses and gratifications, issue publics, audience behavior, audience fragmentation, network analysis, India

Researching publics in datafied societies: Insights from four approaches to the concept of ‘publics’ and a (hybrid) research agenda

Datafication has become an all-encompassing infiltrator in societal processes, among other the formation of publics and the actors that support such processes (i.e. journalism and information technologies). This article reviews four approaches to the study of public formation. These are (1) public and civic connections, (2) issue publics, (3) networked publics and (4) algorithmic publics. The review is a point of departure to conceptually discuss how to study the formation of public in a datafied era and to present a hybrid research agenda with four entry points that can open up for critical analysis of how datafication challenges the relationship between journalism, platforms, algorithms and audiences. Our argument is that a holistic, interdisciplinary and hybrid research approach is needed if the complexity of datafication and its transformative effects on the formation of publics is to be fully grasped.

Networked Publics: The Double Articulation of Code and Politics on Facebook

Through three case studies of online political activism on Facebook, this article conceptualizes the deployment of issue publics (Lippmann, 1993; Marres, 2005) on Facebook. We argue that issue publics on Facebook come into being through a specific set of double articulations of code and politics that link and reshape informational processes, communicational constraints and possibilities, and political practices in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Using Maurizio Lazzarato’s exploration of immaterial labour (2004), we demonstrate the need to further understand the networking of publics and their issues by considering how online platforms provide the material, communicational, and social means for a public to exist and therefore define the parameters for assembling issues and publics and circumscribe a horizon of political agency.

Networked Publics: The Double Articulation of Code and Politics on Facebook

Through three case studies of online political activism on Facebook, this article conceptualizes the deployment of issue publics (Lippmann, 1993; Marres, 2005) on Facebook. We argue that issue publics on Facebook come into being through a specific set of double articulations of code and politics that link and reshape informational processes, communicational constraints and possibilities, and political practices in different and sometimes contradictory ways. Using Maurizio Lazzarato’s exploration of immaterial labour (2004), we demonstrate the need to further understand the networking of publics and their issues by considering how online platforms provide the material, communicational, and social means for a public to exist and therefore define the parameters for assembling issues and publics and circumscribe a horizon of political agency.

Selective Exposure During Uprisings: Examining the Public’s News Consumption and Sharing Tendencies During the 2019 Lebanon Protests

This study examines selective exposure and trust during uprisings. It studies major uses of traditional and social media and assesses the public’s trust in these media and their engagement in sharing news. Focusing on the October 2019 Lebanon uprising, the research surveys thousand Lebanese individuals using a nationally representative probability sample. The findings provide support for selective exposure theory beyond the Western context, particularly for people undergoing stressful political change. The findings also provide support to the robustness of issue publics as a theoretical construct that predicts selective exposure to pro-attitudinal news content, as well as support for attitude strength and attitude importance as two separate predictors.

Ready for the World? Measuring the (Trans-)National Quality of Political Issue Publics on Twitter

This article presents a multi-method research design for measuring the (trans-)national quality of issue publics on Twitter. Online communication is widely perceived as having the potential to overcome nationally bound public spheres. Social media, in particular, are seen as platforms and drivers of transnational communication through which users can easily connect across borders. Transnational interactivity can be expected in particular for policy fields of global concern and elite or activist communication as practiced on Twitter. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of evidence for the enduring national structuration of political communication and publics as it results from a shared language (mostly), culturally defined media markets, established routines of social and political communication, and sociocultural stocks of knowledge. The study goes beyond measuring user interaction and also includes indicators of cross-referential cohesion. It applies a set of computational methods in network and discourse analysis and presents empirical evidence for Twitter communication on climate change being a prime issue of global concern and a globalized policy agenda. For empirical analysis, the study relies on a large Twitter dataset (N ≈ 6m tweets) with tweet messages and metadata collected between 2015 and 2018. Based on basic measurements such as geolocation and language use, the metrics allowed measurement of cross-national user interactions, user centrality in communicative networks, linking behaviour, and hashtag co-occurrences. The findings of the exploratory study suggest that a combined perspective on indicators of user interaction and cross-referential cohesion helps to develop a better and more nuanced understanding of online issue publics.