Public and Cunterpublic

Warner opens his introduction to his 2002 book Publics and Counterpublics by referring to publics as “queer creatures” who have become unavoidable in the “social landscape” as if they are “pavement” (7). In our increasingly “media-saturated forms of life” the texts and artifacts are, in one way or the other, “intrinsically oriented to publics,” and people’s “attention is everywhere solicited by artifacts that say, before anything else, Hello, public!” (7). Though individuals do not recognize all the members of a society, they forge a sense of relationship and participation to “addressable social entities” based on common sense or imagination. Therefore, as Warner puts, Publics are “a kind of [practical] fiction, that has taken on life, and very potent life at that.” Warner’s notion of public as imaginary construct is in line with what Benedict Anderson’s says of nation as “imagined communities.” The idea of public and counterpublic is fundamental to understand the nature of rhetorical circulation in our media and social media saturated digital town squares.