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.
Read more about Public.
Famous quotes containing the word public:
“We can teach prevention. For little kids, the best protection is that they should not be alone in public places. All children should be conscious of strangers, and be discriminating and wary of them. This won’t make them grow up suspicious as long as they have adults around whom they know and can trust: relatives, friends of their parents, parents of friends.”
—“How Parents Can Talk to Their Kids,” Newsweek (January 10, 1994)
“Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.”
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)
“You know, Mr. Secretary, I have found out in the course of a long public life that the things I did not say never hurt me.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)