Longitudinal Relational Publics and their Discursive Overlap with Issue Publics

Abstract

Online discussions of political issues do not always happen in places explicitly dedicated to political talk; they also arise in online spaces focused on at least nominally apolitical interests, identities, and/or places. Whatever one's normative view of politics entering these ``online third spaces,'' understanding who brings political issues into them, and when, requires studying these spaces at scale. In turn, studying these spaces at scale requires a construct that captures both who is speaking and who is listening, and that holds up over time. Building on Bruns' distinction between participant-centered personal publics and post-centered issue publics, we introduce the longitudinal relational networked public (or, simply, the longitudinal public): the coupling of discourse produced by a socially connected set of creators with the durable attention their shared audience gives it. The longitudinal public departs from related relational constructs in three ways: it is anchored in the attention patterns of a non-elite, population-level audience; it treats within-public structure as an object of analysis rather than assuming homogeneity; and it incorporates the audience as a force that shapes creator discourse. In a case study, we identify 150 longitudinal publics from the following ties of a panel of Twitter/X users matched to U.S. voter records, then measure their discursive overlap with the electoral politics and Black Lives Matter issue publics across 2020, a period spanning the murder of George Floyd and the general election. We find that the spaces that best fit the idea of a third space have the most politically heterogeneous audiences, and thus the most potential room for cross-partisan talk. This result, among several others, shows how a relational, audience-aware construct can reveal where and through whom political talk enters everyday online life.