The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society
Communities in Cyberspace
The Myth of Digital Democracy
Republic.com 2.0
The Use of Facebook in National Election Campaigns: Politics as Usual?
ePart '09 Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Electronic Participation
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-BCS Visions of Computer Science Conference
Imagined communities: awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the facebook
PET'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
The configuration of networked publics on the web: evidence from the Greek Indignados movement
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Web Science Conference
Crystallizations in the blizzard: contrasting informal emergency collaboration in Facebook groups
Proceedings of the 7th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Making Sense Through Design
What is Public and Private Anyway? A Pragmatic Take on Privacy and Democracy
XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students - The Complexities of Privacy and Anonymity
Hi-index | 0.00 |
As an increasing part of everyday life becomes connected with the web in many areas of the globe, the question of how the web mediates political processes becomes still more urgent. Several scholars have started to address this question by thinking about the web in terms of a public space. In this paper, we aim to make a twofold contribution towards the development of the concept of publics in web science. First, we propose that although the notion of publics raises a variety of issues, two major concerns continue to be user privacy and democratic citizenship on the web. Well-known arguments hold that the complex connectivity of the web puts user privacy at risk and enables the enclosure of public debate in virtual echo chambers. Our first argument is that these concerns are united by a set assumptions coming from liberal political philosophy that are rarely made explicit. As a second contribution, this paper points towards an alternative way to think about publics by proposing a pragmatist reorientation of the public/private distinction in web science, away from seeing two spheres that needs to be kept separate, towards seeing the public and the private as something that is continuously connected. The theoretical argument is illustrated by reference to a recently published case study of Facebook groups, and future research agendas for the study of web-mediated publics are proposed.