Publicy Defined, And Some Background

Reworking some of the rhetoric I have been using to discuss publicy, so I thought I’d create a dictionary type definition.

Publicy

n. 1. a. The quality or condition of openly sharing personal and relational information with others.

b. The state of participating in open social discourse online, and the social relations that arise from that: a person’s right to publicy.

2. The state of living in public, and identifying with others that do so; publicness.

Some have suggested that I should be using ‘publicity’ rather than ‘publicy’ when discussing the changing nature of our perceptions of privacy in the social web. However, publicity is a term firmly rooted in the philosophical tradition of Spinoza, Kant, Locke and Mill, where the right to freedom of expression — through both speech and publication — is seen as a counter to repressive states and religious organizations. As such, it is strongly tied to debate about political rights and policy, and the rights of individuals to influence public discourse without fear.

However, publicy denotes something quite distinct: the right of the individual to create social identity through on-line connection. It suggests a willingness to openly share information about yourself and your relationships with others in order to affialte with others who are doing the same, and that what is shared is not a scientific theory or a political platform, but something as mundane as music preferences or sexual interests. Publicy does not imply an attempt to bring pressure on groups in authority, or other social coertion. But since online we must publish information to be known, taking on a more public stance that what people have done prior to the web is natural, and this trend toward openness and publicness is accelerating.

Those embracing publicy are not making a case for freedom of speech; it’s more about freedom of association. So, publicity — in either the everyday PR sense or the more learned philosophical or historical sense — is just not the right term.

As an example of the way that publicity is used in philosophical or policy contexts, consider this:

SLAVKO SPLICHAL, Personal Right to Communicate as a “Privilege” of Social Groups

All social and technological changes we have experienced in the twentieth century do not justify in itself the rejection of the enlightened idea of publicity. As Dewey argued in the controversy with Lippmann, “Until secrecy, prejudice, bias, misrepresentation, and propaganda as well as sheer ignorance are replaced by inquiry and publicity, we have no way of telling how apt for judgment of social policies the existing intelligence of the masses may be” (Dewey 1927/1991, 209). These changes point toward the need for major changes in practical forms of publicity to preserve the democratic virtues embedded in the original idea(s) of publicity as universal norm to regulate public discourse. New forms of publicity surely cannot take rise without a broader process of re-shaping the public sphere and, specifically, media institutions and forms of media representation. Dahlgren (1995, 11-16) rightfully emphasises that an important role in this process play the total social structure, which includes all the institutional arrangements of society from social stratification to the entire educational system and its place in the social order, and different forms of sociocultural interaction — from non-mediated face-to-face communication or “the public sphere beyond the media” to the interface of media and citizens. Although new procedures of mediatization and representation, which dominate in postmodernity, and their social and political consequences may seem to suggest that we should leave off the universal Kantian concept of publicity, this turn would be so radical that the question is in place as to whether all the new diversified opportunities and practices of reception and consumption in (mass) communication still help form and express opinions in public and by the public, which authoritative institutions must take into account. Thus a more “conservative” approach focused on the counter-factual entity of publicity still seems to be more adequate, for without the central concept of publicity, the significance of the media for democratic political process is depleted altogether.

A democratic system should provide informed decisions on public issues, and this can only happen on the basis of an open information and communication system that allows for the personal right of public expression or “public use of reason” in different forms of communication. With no public use of reason in the media, which is based on the right of citizens to be heard, there is no democracy. With public use of reason only in the media, there is no democracy either: democ- racy also rests on the principle of dialogue, not only mass dissemination.

So publicity has too many overtones from this context of use: I don’t want to have to spend hours qualifying a slightly different sense of ‘publicity’ with reference to Kant, Spinoza, Dewey, and Splichal. Neither do I have to explain that ‘publicity’ is not just PR or corporate speech. I will simply move ahead with the newly coined ‘publicy’.