Public

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In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings.^[1][2] This is a different concept to the sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or public sphere.^[1] The concept of a public has also been defined in political science, psychology, marketing, and advertising. In public relations and communication science, it is one of the more ambiguous concepts in the field.^[3] Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, and suffered more recent years from being blurred, as a result of conflation of the idea of a public with the notions of audience, market segment, community, constituency, and stakeholder.^[4]