Public

Public

In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere. The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, it has suffered in more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.

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Famous quotes containing the word public:

    Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.
    Robert Warshow (1917–1955)

    Well of all things in the world, I don’t suppose anything can be so dreadful as a public wedding—my stars!—I should never be able to support it!
    Frances Burney (1752–1840)

    President Lowell of Harvard appealed to students ‘to prepare themselves for such services as the Governor may call upon them to render.’ Dean Greenough organized an ‘emergency committee,’ and Coach Fisher was reported by the press as having declared, ‘To hell with football if men are needed.’
    —For the State of Massachusetts, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)