Understanding publics : theories, practices, transformations

Table of contents

• Public(s): Apparently self-evident but actually not (Béatrice Fleury and Jacques Walter)

• The recomposition of publics and the public sphere

  • What is the place of the public in the public sphere? (Loïc Ballarini)
  • How has the study of television audiences in the field of information and communication sciences evolved conceptually? (Celine Ségur)
  • Facebook: An information platform for young people and an audience vector for the media (Arnaud Mercier and Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel)

• Publics and the digital sphere: Did you say “publics”?

  • Beyond use: The public as a concept to study ICTs (Pierre Morelli)
  • Neither autonomous users, nor public? On the subject of an online socio-technical space (Angeliki Monnier)
  • The matter of public in the serious use of gaming in an educational context (Stéphane Goria)

• Publics, health and innovation

  • Consideration of the on-line circulation of health information in Africa: The reciprocal contributions made by applying anthropological and communicational approaches (Emmanuelle Simon and Brigitte Simonnot)
  • Communication strategy of websites of African clinics and donor centres: Who are their target publics? (Luc Massou)
  • Digital mediation available to a suffering public (Driss Ablali and Brigitte Wiederspiel)

• Publics and the written word: Between system (dispositif) and space

  • Cultural mechanisms (dispositifs) and university writing workshop at the Metz Pompidou Centre. Mediation for and by the publics (Carole Bisenius-Penin and Laurent Le Bon)
  • Considering writer’s residencies from the viewpoint of their publics (Adeline Clerc-Florimond)

• 10 entries to think out the publics

  • The audience (Céline Ségur)
  • Public debate (Arnaud Mercier)
  • Public sphere (Loïc Ballarini)
  • Public spirit (Marieke Stein)
  • Crowd (Béatrice Fleury)
  • Readership (Claude Poissenot)
  • Public opinion (Vincent Carlino and Clément Mabi)
  • Public (lexicon) (Michelle Lecolle)
  • Tarde (Gabriel) (Jean-Marie Privat)
  • Tönnies (Ferdinand) (Jacques Walter)

• Authors

• Series Index

Summary

In the analysis of communicational practices — whether in the form of audience, audience, consumers, users, recipients, participants, spectators — there is an imprecision of terms and occurrences that leaves room for terminological and theoretical indecision. Hence the desire to clarify the contours of the notion of public, while relying on empirical material, and to examine its multiple transformations.
Thanks to a collective interdisciplinary program, researchers in information and communication sciences and in language sciences from the Center for Research on Mediations of the University of Lorraine have studied the conditions of production and diffusion of information and knowledge, the attitudes and behaviors of the public, the mechanisms of inter-comprehension or of communicational blockages and the weight of technological factors in mediations. These issues are addressed using methods that combine sociological surveys, targeted ethnographic studies, experiments, and corpus analyses. They are applied to a variety of fi elds, extending work that has already been done, but also shaking up certain results.
This book gathers a selection of signifi cant studies around four sections: the concept of public space; the relationship to the digital; innovations in the fi eld of health; the relationship to writing in the cultural sector.
Béatrice Fleury is a university professor and a member of the Center for Research on Mediations at the University of Lorraine.
Jacques Walter is a university professor emeritus and a member of the Center for Research on Mediations at the University of Lorraine.
They are co-directors of the journal Questions de communication.