"Imagined publics" - Roundtable session

Abstract

How do producers and designers of Internet services and contents conceive of their publics? Both media studies and Internet studies have highlighted how actual publics and audiences remain unpredictable, heterogeneous and often quite different from how they are imagined. Furthermore, traditional notions and theory-laden terms are frequently used by marketers, journalists and scholars to refer to Internet publics without specifying in what sense they are using them--e.g. communities, social networks, friends, fans, amateurs, customers. This roundtable focuses on potential discrepancies between Internet professionals’ representations of their publics (including their expectations and motivations) and what empirical studies reveal about them. It will also address the imaginaries mobilized in professionals’ representations of their users and their products’ usage. How are these imaginaries influencing design practices? To what extent do actual users correspond to targeted (imagined) publics? The initial speakers will provide some insights to these questions by drawing on empirical case studies that constitute a sample of a broader collective effort to be published in an upcoming special issue of the French-language journal Communication . These studies look at various imaginaries summoned by Internet devices such as "science 2.0", "brand community" or "political Web". Five speakers (including the two organizers) will ignite the discussion: Alexandre Coutant, co-chair (University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada); Guillaume Latzko-Toth, co-chair (Laval University, Canada); Florence Millerand (University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada); Sandrine Roginsky (Catholic University of Leuwen, Belgium) and Julia Velkovska (Orange Labs, France)