Publicness on Platforms Tracing the mutual articulation of platform architectures and user practices

This chapter takes the exploration of the constitution and continuous transformation of online publics a step further by shifting the focus from publics as the outcome of processes of communication to publicness as a communicative process that follows specific trajectories. This approach is illustrated through case studies on the role particular social media platforms in two episodes of public contention. The first explores the Twitter communication in the year following the New Delhi gang rape protests of December 2012. And the second looks at the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook Page, which became a vital stage for the expression of public grievances in Egypt in 2010 and 2011. The exploration of these case studies demonstrates that there is substantial variation between trajectories of contentious publicness depending on how: platform architectures mediate relations of publicness, users adopt particular platform affordances, and affective ties that bind publics together are assembled and reassembled.