Private/
Public

Agnieszka Hess, Jagiellonian University, Poland
agnieszka.hess@uj.edu.pl

The differentiation between what is private and what is, or becomes, public is one of the fundamental dilemmas when describing the contemporary public sphere and opinion. The term public refers to a reality insofar as it is common to the general public and at the same time distinct from the individual’s private place in the world. What is public is visible, open, accessible – as opposed to what is private, hidden, and concerns the individual’s personal life and/or a limited group of people that are close to the individual. In the digital age, characterised by the mediatisation of almost all areas of human life, the boundaries between what is public and what is private are fading. The areas of an individual’s personal engagement (such as family, friends, individual interests, health, etc.) intertwine with areas of common interest (such as work, local society, social engagement, but also global issues, for instance political affairs). This is among others due to the multidimensional character of contemporary communication tools and the ways in which they are used. A systemic, political science approach to the private/public dichotomy takes into account the distinction between the activities of the state, the authorities or institutions derived from the authorities, and the area of grassroots civic activity (political community vs. civil society). In modern democracies, defining a conceptual framework for public or private affairs is only possible on a high level of generality. The domain of democracies developing in a deliberative spirit is the right of all citizens to participate in public affairs, whereas political life encompasses all systems of power, understood as the ability to make transformations.

Keywords: dichotomy, personal engagement, public sphere

Related Entries: Publics/Mainstream Publics/Counter-Publics

References:
Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. University of Chicago Press.
Axtmann, R. (2005). Liberal democracy into the twenty-first century. Globalisation, integration and the nation state. Manchester University Press.
Bruns, A. (2023). From “the” public sphere to a network of publics: Towards an empirically founded model of contemporary public communication spaces. Communication Theory, 33, 70–81.