John Dewey argued a public forms only when people face a shared problem
In 1927 philosopher John Dewey offered a surprising definition: a public is not simply the population but a group of people who face a similar problem, recognise it and organise to deal with it. On this view publics come and go with circumstances, springing up around issues rather than existing permanently.
Building on Dewey, communication scholar James Grunig developed a situational theory of publics in 1983. Nonpublics have no problem at all. Latent publics have one but have not noticed. Aware publics recognise their problem, and active publics do something about it. The scheme gave public relations a way to predict which groups would engage with an issue.
The word descends from Latin publicus, linked to populus, the source of populace, and generally refers to a mass of people connected by some common interest. In political science and history a public means citizens engaged with affairs of state. In public relations and communication science it is surprisingly slippery, increasingly blurred with audience, market segment, community, constituency and stakeholder. It also differs from the sociological idea of the public sphere.
Public relations theorists draw careful lines. A public is a subset of an organisation's stakeholders who care about a specific issue. Unlike a market, which is usually passive, created by the organisation and bound to it by exchange, a public creates and organises itself. Campaigners distinguish target publics whose support is essential, intervening publics such as opinion formers who carry messages, and influentials whom targets consult. Winning broad public backing mattered, for instance, in the Massachusetts debate over same-sex marriage in 2003 and 2004.
Not all definitions are situational. Kirk Hallahan of Colorado State University describes a public as people who relate to an organisation with varying degrees of activity or passivity. Samuel Mateus, in a 2011 paper, argued a public is neither a mere media audience nor simply a rational debating body. Newer thinking adds networked publics: social groups reshaped by digital technology, which are at once the space the networks create and the imagined community that emerges there.
Source: Public
