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. This is a different concept to the
sociological concept of the Öffentlichkeit or
public sphere. 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. Although it has definitions in the theory of the field that have been formulated from the early 20th century onwards, it has suffered in 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.