Private Botschaften im öffentlichen Raum

Beneath the bourgeois, mass media and digital public spheres lives a barely noticed fourth (written) small public sphere in which private closeness is demonstrated, dismantled or negotiated. Everyday writing surfaces serve as a rehearsal stage on which invisible young people can play out their feelings of love, hate, jealousy, bullying and exclusion in front of a (disinterested) pseudo-public without risk. The (romantic) boundary between small community and large public that is maintained here is abandoned in social media when private and often intimate matters are exposed to a dissociated and thus irresponsible public.