John Foxe, one of the first best-selling authors of the modern printing age, was convinced that printing would end the power of the papacy, just as Nicholas Negroponte, one of the champions of the digital age, believed that the Internet would challenge the nation state and other hierarchies. Three centuries apart, they were both writing at times of revolutionary changes in communications technologies. The certainties they share with regard to the direct social and political consequences of these changes appear, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, unjustified. The pope is still with us, as is the nation state. Changes in publicmaking, by which I mean how ideas are made public and how they circulate, and how these changes transform political power, are often complex, subtle and do not move in a single direction. However, printing did change the processes of publicmaking in the seventeenth century, just as digital communications are changing public-making in the twenty-first century.

In this chapter, I discuss some of these sometimes subtle changes in publicmaking, examining one recent and prominent example of digital public engagement in South Africa: the #FeesMustFall campaign of university students demanding free education. The new (and newly visible) practice of adding hashtags to online communications is a complex act of public-making. It is highly fluid compared to the previously dominant processes of mediated public-making. The Internet, including social media, is sometimes described as if it is a ‘space’ distinct from and in contrast to other public spaces – a ‘virtual sphere’. However, this is to misunderstand the practices of digital public-making. Public engagements online take place in a constantly fluid set of digital public spaces.