Conclusion: Datapublics as a Site of Struggles

This concluding chapter takes stock of the contributions made by this volume, in which we developed the concept of datapublics to understand the transformations that have affected the fields of journalism and media. We suggest seeing the construction of publics as hybrid – not directly connected to any specific media space or enabled by any specific technology – as a struggle between different normative ideals embodied in publics, and as a process involving different modalities of publicness and datafication. Publicness (attention, visibility, legitimacy, hierarchization and valorization) and datafication (as a process, a discourse and a value-system) become physical, virtual and imagined spaces in which struggles for the construction of datapublics take place, struggles that affect not only how datapublics come into being in datafied societies, but with all actors involved in their formation.