Like “private,” “public” derives ideological force from the confusing of distinct senses and situations. The term switches between what is owned, decided upon, and managed by the community and what is merely observed by and relevant to the community— that is, between the public as active participant (modeled on the organized political group) and the public as passive spectator (modeled on the theatrical audience and reading public). “Public” thus can imply that the active, participatory aspects of politics are present within the more passive, aestheticized context of spectatorship. This switch encourages a tendency to inflate the degree and significance of agency available in the act of cultural consumption—the suggestion, say, that shopping and striking are comparable practices. Yet this ambiguity also raises such productive questions as how distinct the two sorts of publicness are and what role theatricality and symbolism can play within politics. The same ambiguity drives media research into how, when, and whether what is public in the minimal sense of visibility (celebrity, publicity) translates into what is public in a weightier sense like sociability or organized political will (activism, collaboration).

This is an excerpt from Bruce Robbins’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 186)