I’d like to respond and clarify two points, one about the public sphere, and the second about the use of sociality or publicy to indicate the socialized self.

Regarding the public sphere, you write, “‘I don’t personally gain anything from the use of the institutional connotaitons of the public where when considering user and social practices in social media.” I’ll stand by the ongoing reconfiguration of the public sphere in the age of the internet and social media. Institutions previously considered public sphere, media and government, are now infused with people talking back & talking to each other on a larger scale. See Jay Rosen for discussion of media evolution, and and Micah Sifry for discussion of politics. This characteristic is problematic and immature – for example the Obama succeeded with an organized online social network in his presendential campaign but not in governance. This is a significant change. It is brand new sort of mix of broadcast, discussion and group action.

As for the use of the term “self” as a socially constructed entity – this is true and accepted in the anthro/psych/soc community. The challenge is communication with a tech audience which has an atomistic understanding of the individual that is bolstered by the necessary but limited concept data privacy. There is a need to communicate the ideas about socially constructed selves to the makers and designers of tools and standards who think about individuals. The neologisms “sociality” or “publicy” help communicate to this audience that “individual data” and “my social graph” are not unitary things. Sociality isn’t a neologism from the point of view of soc, but it is a neologism from the point of view of technologists and netizens. When the tools and standards-makers start taking about the socially assembled self, and consequences for platform design, this discussion will have succeeded.

In summary:
* I think that the public sphere around institutions is changing, and we need new thinking and practices to describe its characteristics and emerging opportunities
* I think that using sociality, or publicy, as neologisms for the tech community can help communicate the switch from an atomistic self to a social self.

The discussion of norms is interesting in itself, and a topic for different discussion.

My main gripe, if it’s even a gripe, is with publicy as a term. It sounds to me like public with a bit of privacy. And in that it’s a new term, I have no idea where it stands in relation to all the good concepts and arguments already out there.

My gripe with public, on the other hand, is as you noted specific to the public sphere to which I think public unavoidably refers. I don’t personally gain anything from use of the institutional connotations of the public sphere *when considering user and social practices* in social media.

Those are, to me, the effect of many acts of mediated communication and interaction, captured, preserved, and made visible within different media contexts and by means of a variety of navigation, search, browse, and other platform features.

In other words, I find it risky to suggest that a public coheres within the “space” at all. If “it” does, and this is where the predicative slippage can occur when describing aggregate effects as nouns, it is still to me only as an effect. An effect, perhaps, still demanding certain normative recognition, respect of privacy, data ownership rights, and so on. But still, a concept for second order effects of mediated communication.

Now publicy would, to me, add value if it were distinct in relation to privacy. Perhaps I misunderstand the term. If it were to add value as an alternative to “public,” it would still refer to a public that is constructed after and only on the basis of individual acts and activities. So in this sense it is no better than anything sociology can already give us. (Sociology, too, constructs communities or collectivities out of individual agency.) And sociology can give us not only study of interaction, communication, language, but also a rich framework for meaning production within mediated contexts and using interface patterns and common social media features.

So where I prefer the Self over private/public is that there is a rich legacy of work already on the Self, its relation to the Other, and interest in socially-mediated activity. The concept of the Self, too, captures agency, which privacy does not. The Self reflects, which privacy does not. Etc.

It’s difficult to let go of architectural and spatial metaphors entirely. They help to illustrate the online world. But it’s just individual people using tiny boxes typing to other individuals using tiny boxes. There is no public sphere here — but instead a new way of communicating, and of mediating interaction by means of interface techniques. These permit individual actions to be represented in the form of aggregate (second order) activity. How *that* is constructed is the key issue in privacy IMHO, for Buzz, Facebook, and Google search (for example) all create surfaces on which individiual user activity can be re-presented (out of context, in new contexts, etc).

Access, availability, visibility — these are aspects of views (IMHO) made possible by technology and having social and cultural implications (of normative kind) yet to be resolved. There is no new publicy, only many cases in which intent, context, audience, and access all become mixed up and sometimes regrettably so.

Cases, because that is how norms work — conventions that are “right” within a particular social context. These norms are sometimes the small form, or personal intent. Sometimes the large form, or institutionally authorized. Norms don’t exist so much as extend a claim to rightness on behalf of a person in a particular situation and context.

Now in the case of small form normative claims, individuals may protest privacy violations and be defensibly right or not. But in the large form case, and this is interesting and new, violations may be committed by companies possessing personal information and data. And that is where, clearly, Google’s Buzz, and Facebook’s profile privacy debacle, each made us aware of the need for restraint by these new institutions — for profit companies in effect making unsanctioned public use of individual personal information.

I know that was long-winded. But wanted to clarify that I view Self/Social as adequate to discussing user and social practice issues — as has been the case in past debates around agency and structure. I would separate concepts pertaining to agency from those pertaining to large form social institutions — be they social media companies or legal, economic, educational institutions etc. And similarly, distinguish norms as “effects of common practices” from norms as “culturally shared worldviews held in common.”

cheers Adina!