COMM mar 19 les 10.doc

th Mar202012 Public Who has power Who has the right to represent others How have they come to earn that title of being the representative of othersThe notion of the public is a powerful feature of our culture and yet as almost anyone who has looked at this question realizes that the public is very strange and amorphous termGenerally we can say that the public is a kind of social grouping a way of talking about people who are grouped together around a particular purposeFor example we can talk about the voting public group of people that come together for a particular purposeto elect a government We can think about the viewing publica group of people who come together at the same time to watch the same show We can also think of the Canadian pubica group of people tied together by citizenshipWe can think about the public as a kind of social grouping or as an object for communicationin other words we can argue that certain kinds of communication imagine a publicWhen someone stands up in front of a group of people they are well aware of who theyre speaking toan understanding of who the public maybe helps us understand the way we communicate with them and vice versaWe can think about the public in a socio economic kind of way or a communicative way We can also think about understanding the public by understanding its oppositethe privateWe use things like screen bloggers to prevent people from entering our private space Even in public places we privatize ourselves by plugging in our ear buds we post comments as anonymous because we want to communicate without compromise All of these examples here prove that our notion of public is a way of grouping and separatingToday focuses on a particular notion on public based on work of Habermas In 1960 he wrote a piece called the structural transformation of the public sphere With the title there is an inherent notion that Habermas is arguing about historyhis point is that the area of social life which is public is historic in nature and he associates what we would consider to be the public sphere with modernity He argues that in the premodern period there was no public life in the way that we understand it There were no places for the public to come together and articulate The monarchy was the source of public affairs