Publics

Personal and calculated

Let’s continue to discuss the idea of publics. What other types are there, and what factors affect how they are formed?

Personal publics

The community of users following and participating in hashtag conversations is separate from the underlying follower/followee networks on Twitter. Through hashtags you can explore what users are posting even if you don’t follow them. However, other users may not use hashtags at all, but engage only with the users they follow and those users who follow them. Therefore, like other platforms, Twitter also enables ‘personal publics’ that are different from the traditional audiences of broadcast media such as television.

In these personal publics, you know your audience because you know who follows you. On Facebook, you have to approve each connection. You choose what information you want to share with this audience, just as they choose which of your posts they want to view (although perhaps assisted by an algorithm that prioritises certain content). The traditional understanding of publics in the mass media sense is an audience with members largely unknown to each other, viewing content selected by editorial teams, on the receiving end of one-way communication. Personal publics are different because they’re conversational, with familiar members sharing their own content and communicating back and forth.

Calculated publics

Publics are also increasingly affected by how the Twitter platform itself shapes the content selection that users encounter. When you search for a hashtag on the Twitter website, what you see by default is an algorithmic selection of the top tweets for that hashtag. This is based on the level of engagement with each tweet, ranked via favourites and retweets, and the Twitter status of the senders, measured by their number of followers. Twitter may also create special pages for major events, from the Oscars to the World Cup. This is not unusual: Facebook, too, presents only a selection of all of your friends’ updates when you go to your news feed. Such interventions by the platform operators create calculated, algorithmic publics – and they affect what content users are likely to see and engage with.