Segmenting Publics

This research synthesis was commissioned by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to examine audience segmentation methods and tools in the area of public engagement. It provides resources for assessing the ways in which segmentation tools might be used to enhance the various activities through which models of public engagement in higher education are implemented. Understanding the opinions, values, and motivations of members of the public is a crucial feature of successful engagement. Segmentation methods can offer potential resources to help understand the complex set of interests and attitudes that the public have towards higher education. Key findings: There exist a number of existing segmentations which address many of the areas of activity found in Universities and HEIs. These include segmentations which inform strategic planning of communications; segmentations which inform the design of collaborative engagement activities by museums, galleries, and libraries; and segmentations that are used to identify under-represented users and consumers. Segmentation is, on its own, only a tool, used in different ways in different contexts. The broader strategic rationale shaping the application and design of segmentation methods is a crucial factor in determining the utility of segmentation tools. Four issues emerged of particular importance: 1. Segmentation exercises are costly and technically complex. Undertaking segmentations therefore requires significant commitment of financial and professional resources by HEIs; the appropriate interpretation, analysis, and application of segmentation exercises also require high levels of professional capacity and expertise 2. Undertaking a segmentation exercise has implications for the internal organisational operations of HEIs, not only for how they engage with external publics and stakeholders 3. Segmentation tools are adopted to inform interventions of various sorts, and superficially to differentiate and sometime discriminate between how groups of people are addressed and engaged. 4. For HEIs, the ethical issues and reputational risks which have been identified in this Research Synthesis as endemic to the application of segmentation methods for public purposes are particularly relevant

Why Youth (heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as "networked publics." As with unmediated publics like parks and malls, youth use networked publics to gather, socialize with their peers, and make sense of and help build the culture around them. This article examines American youth engagement in networked publics and considers how properties unique to such mediated environments (e.g., persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences) affect the ways in which youth interact with one another. Ethnographic data is used to analyze how youth recognize these structural properties and find innovative ways of making these systems serve their purposes. Issues like privacy and impression management are explored through the practices of teens and youth participation in social network sites is situated in a historical discussion of youth's freedom and mobility in the United States

Public crises, public futures

This article begins to map out a novel approach to analyzing contemporary contexts of public crisis, relationships between them and possibilities that these scenes hold out for politics. The article illustrates and analyses a small selection of examples of these kinds of contemporary scenes and calls for greater attention to be given to the conditions and consequences of different forms and practices of public and political mediation. In offering a three-fold typology to delineate differences between ‘abject’, ‘audience’ and ‘agentic’ publics the article begins to draw out how political and public futures may be seen as being bound up with how the potentialities, capacities and qualities that publics are imagined to have and resourced to perform. Public action and future publics are therefore analysed here in relation to different versions of contemporary crisis and the political concerns and publics these crises work to articulate, foreground and imaginatively and practically support

Taking Food Fights Online: Analysis of Chipotle’s Attempt to Cultivate Conversation with \u3cem\u3eThe Scarecrow\u3c/em\u3e Video

This study examines Chipotle’s use of The Scarecrow, an animated YouTube video, to initiate conversation about food sustainability issues. Results illustrate publics were highly engaged in conversation with one another, even though the organization did not directly engage with publics or employ principles of dialogic communication. We highlight the importance of network approaches to studying online interaction between stakeholder groups for public relations scholars interested in dialogical theory frameworks

Publics and Audiences in Ancient Greece

An overview of the historical constitution of theater audiences in Classical Athens and the implications of this assessment. I first sketch out the dominant ways in which modern scholars have defined ancient audiences. I argue that attention to (male) citizenship or Greek identity has effaced the presence and role of other groups in the audience. In the second section I discuss the evidence for audiences in ancient Athens. Available space for spectators and the various barriers to these spaces shaped the diverse constitution of audiences; from the Classical to early Hellenistic period (ca. 480–300 BC), theaters did not merely expand and proliferate but redefined the make-up of audiences. The third section explores the discourse of audiences in ancient sources. As I briefly elaborate in the conclusion, this chapter aims to unsettle and provincialize the idea of citizen audiences

Modeling the formation of attentive publics in social media: the case of Donald Trump

Previous research has shown the importance of Donald Trump’s Twitter activity, and that of his Twitter following, in spreading his message during the primary and general election campaigns of 2015–2016. However, we know little about how the publics who followed Trump and amplified his messages took shape. We take this case as an opportunity to theorize and test questions about the assembly of what we call “attentive publics” in social media. We situate our study in the context of current discussions of audience formation, attention flow, and hybridity in the United States’ political media system. From this we derive propositions concerning how attentive publics aggregate around a particular object, in this case Trump himself, which we test using time series modeling. We also present an exploration of the possible role of automated accounts in these processes. Our results reiterate the media hybridity described by others, while emphasizing the importance of news media coverage in building social media attentive publics.Accepted manuscrip

SaveDisney.com and Activist Challenges: A Habermasian Perspective on Corporate Legitimacy

This study develops a Habermasian framework for evaluating and generating challenges to organizational legitimacy. The launch of the SaveDisney.com web site represents an innovative example of an Internet-based activist public successfully challenging a corporation’s legitimacy and advocating for changes in corporate governance. Legitimacy research has focused on strategies used by organizations to build legitimacy (e.g., Dowling & Pfeffer, 1975; Metzler, 2001), but scholars rarely address how publics challenge legitimacy claims. Using Habermas’ conceptualization of communicative action and legitimacy to explore the SaveDisney.com case offers insight into ways that activist publics successfully challenge and reject the legitimacy claims of powerful corporations

Bodies and Publics in Two Discourses

The recent call for a conceptual and intellectual decolonization in the humanities critiques the conventional, all-white, largely male philosophical canon. Its critique is directed at the centering of the experiences of this specific group in global knowledge transmission practices. Its proponents focus on the canon’s implicit claim, namely that only one social group is able to think thoroughly and accurately about all problems of philosophical significance across varying spatiotemporal contexts. In this short article, I will use two different debates to make some aspects of this call more meaningful: the US-American discourse in academic philosophy on deracializing the knowing subject and the post-Holocaust German understanding of public intellectual spaces (sections 2 and 3 respectively)

Global Publics Embrace Social Networking

Analyzes survey results on trends in the use of social networking sites, cell phone and computer ownership, and use of Internet and e-mail in twenty-two countries by age, gender, and education. Compares generational and gender gaps among countries