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:

    “In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
    —George Grosz (1893–1959)

    “Hast ever ben in Omaha
    Where rolls the dark Missouri down,
    Where four strong horses scarce can draw
    An empty wagon through the town?
    Where sand is blown from every mound
    To fill your eyes and ears and throat;
    Where all the steamboats are aground,
    And all the houses are afloat?...
    If not, take heed to what I say,
    You’ll find it just as I have found it;
    And if it lies upon your way
    For God’s sake, reader, go around it!”
    —For the State of Nebraska, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    “From a bed in this hotel Seargent S. Prentiss arose in the middle of the night and made a speech in defense of a bedbug that had bitten him. It was heard by a mock jury and judge, and the bedbug was formally acquitted.”
    —Federal Writers’ Project Of The Wor, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)