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Over the past few weeks, much has been said about the public and public sentiment regarding President Jacob Zuma.
It is important to always keep in mind that notions of “the public” and “public sentiment” are highly contested, because the public – as we understand it and as circulated by various media – is about whose voice and whose interests matter.
Not because some people should, or inherently do, matter more, but because we hear, read about or treat them as mattering more. And whatever is the dominant voice or narrative gets to enjoy immense privilege; it often gets to be the “right story”.
The idea of who makes up the public is also heavily influenced by who we trust – akin to who our chosen media sources or analysts say is “smart” enough or “legitimate” enough to represent, or be the public whose views we care about.
The public, even though it is based on actual members of the citizenry (the broader 52 million of us), can be overstated if your voice is considered to matter more – or ignored, or even erased, if you are poor.
We see some of the consequences of this exclusivity and exclusion in who is mainly spoken to and about; namely, those who are middle class, urban dwelling, able to converse in English and active online.
And more men than women get the chance to be the public, according to public sentiment. The disparity regarding who is represented in public sentiment is highly significant, because it influences what we believe to be real and not about who is telling the truth and who is not.
That disparity is how the myth of the rainbow nation has survived for so long. We went looking for it, privileged the voices that confirmed it and framed its dissenters as rare.
The constructed public is how student issues, which have persisted for the past two decades, were framed as being largely new for some people – because their sources for public sentiment kept telling them everything, “born-frees” included, was okay.
Besides elections and Stats SA surveys (in which the represented public is also not static), what we refer to as “the public” is based on generalisations of specific emotions and thoughts – often those that agree with our own thoughts.
Therefore, when we talk about, or hear others refer to “the majority” and “the public”, it is critical that we ask: which public? Because in this country, “the public”, as we read, see and understand it, seldom means the lived or nuanced public experience.
