The idea of ‘the public’ as a singular entity, circumscribed by bonds of national solidarity and expressing itself in a unified public sphere, has become increasingly problematic. New media and information technologies are undercutting traditional notions of the public sphere, opening up a range of innovative possibilities for public communication. New objects of public concern are emerging: for example, around environmental issues, human rights, trade justice and access to the global ‘commons’ of scarce resources. And many of these issues are in turn summoning up new subjects of public action that articulate local and national scales of activity with transnational scales. At the same time, shifts in the political landscape are intensifying efforts by government and non-governmental actors to summon up figures of the active citizen, the responsible community and the choice-making consumer, all of which potentially challenge models of the public as a privileged scene of collective agency. In many nation states, such summonings seem to displace the classical values of publicness in the name of individual or community responsibility; and they are associated with the rolling out of public policies that are increasingly focused on regulating how personal lives should be lived.

In trying to make sense of these shifts, we are confronted with a bewildering set of normative claims. Indeed, both academic and policy writings on publics and the public sphere tend to be long on assertions and injunctions and weak on empirical substance. New media, it is claimed, have already displaced the value and relevance of ‘old’ communication technologies in sustaining democracy (see, for example, www.e-democracy.org; Leadbeater, 2008). New strategies of governance that empower individual persons rather than treating ‘the public’ as an undifferentiated unity are offering opportunities for independence and selfdevelopment that were unthinkable under the paternalistic welfare state (see, for example, Diamond et al, 2008). New ways of engaging citizens in public dialogue and debate, whether by public or commercial institutions, are offering an immediacy and sensitivity to difference that were impossible under old norms of representative democracy). New contentious struggles demonstrate the irrelevance of forms of politics bounded by the nation state (Drache, 2008).