Counterpublicness and Hybrid Tactics across Physical and Mediated Spaces

This chapter explores citizens’ attempts to gather across physical as well as new and old mediated spaces and make themselves count in today’s datafied, hybrid media system. Processes of public formation have fundamentally changed due to digitalisation and datafication, and we explore these changes through a case study of COVID-19 sceptics as a paradigmatic case of counterpublicness. In the chapter, we present a typology of tactics where we distinguish between 1) mobilisation tactics, 2) counter tactics, and 3) publicity tactics. Furthermore, we illustrate how overarching datafied hybrid quantification logic highly drives these tactics. Finally, we discuss the importance of following processes of public formation and datafication across contexts to fully grasp how constraints in one space might induce a shift to another and, therefore, how these logics and tactics flow between spaces.