Political communication is being dramatically altered by the new or social media. The new media has discovered this communication. The politicians have discovered this communication. The paper is an argument about what the public domain becomes as the new media becomes pervasive in society. The evidence used to buttress the argument is taken from 800 collections of streams of Twitter messages. Twitter is particularly useful as evidence because it is by default public. Hence, it is in the public domain. And it is readily available for researchers. The conclusion is that we have moved from broadcast-audience to co-motion, and that is a dramatic transformation of the public domain.

The argument is twofold. One, the character of political communication on Twitter is sufficiently different from the general character of the Twitter stream, from the “firehose”, as it is known that political communication should be considered as a separable domain of communication. Specifically, retweets, urls, and hashtags are used far more frequently in political communication than is true for the full stream of messages and that reflects communication which is more interactive than is generally the case. Two, context is needed for characterizing twitter streams. In the case of political communication there are parameters on the use of these tools, which facilitate interactive communication that sets such a context. If most political tweets have retweets or urls between some low bound and a high bound, then one has a way to characterize any specific stream that is being investigated. The analyses will begin the investigation of these parameters.

If the reach of communication via Twitter is as great as it seems to be, that means a remarkable reconstruction of the public domain is in process. Until recently the public domain was the mass media and what they presented to their audiences. Now the audience has voice and is audience only in a new way. The potential consequences for the organization of politics are great. But there is the “if”. The report examines two challenges to the claim that the reach of the new media is as great as it may appear to be. One challenge is the number of individual accounts on Twitter. There seem to be too few to have the reach suggested. The other challenge is fake accounts. If the number of fake accounts is great, then the numbers for reach are a gross exaggeration. Those two challenges are examined and shown to be appropriate, but that the end result is diminishing the numbers about reach much less than would question the reconstruction of the public domain

Journal Article SOUTHERN CONSERVATISM: CONSTITUENCY OPINION AND CONGRESSIONAL VOTING Get access GEORGE ROBERT BOYNTON GEORGE ROBERT BOYNTON George Robert Boynton is a member of the Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, Iowa City Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 29, Issue 2, SUMMER 1965, Pages 259–269, https://doi.org/10.1086/267322 Published: 01 January 1965