Historically, the concepts of public and publicness have acquired different contents and meanings. The concept of public, which can be identified with the state and the people, has also been the subject of different perspectives and interpretations in public sphere debates.
As Mustafa Durmuş notes, “most commonly, the public is conceptualized as open to all, belonging to the whole society, private or impersonal, non-family or non-market, collectivism, collective ownership and solidarity, public sphere of agency, people (group of people), public spaces (space, place), public service (institutions), and the right or responsibility of citizenship and representation.”
According to Antonio L. Rappa on the concept of public space, public space can be defined in five dimensions;
-A physical space for people to communicate and interact,
-A non-physical metaphorical space created by human actions,
-A space for different forms of information exchange between two parties,
A space where different forms of articulation of relationships and intellectual and non-intellectual debates take place,
It can be a space where planned or unplanned policies of states and non-state actors emerge.
The public sphere is also where class struggles are waged and class hegemony is established. For this reason, all areas of life are too important to be ignored. One of these areas is virtual environments.
Since the mid-1990s, with the introduction of the internet into our lives, information has started to flow on social networks, which are autonomous spaces that are largely outside the control of the government, information has been carried over great distances in a very short time and has taken on a fluid quality.
The words information, communication, interaction and cooperation have become the basic concepts of today's world, and this change has also changed the way people come together and organize. Social networks on the internet, which transform the relationship of individuals with information, enrich the possibilities of information, communication and interaction, and bring people together in a virtual environment, enable the formation of resistance zones by creating counter-public spaces in the virtual environment, which is a new public space.
In this autonomous space of the virtual environment, where there is no hierarchy and no center, people express their sorrows, ideas, images and hopes, growing a participatory and sharing culture. By communicating, interacting and collaborating with each other, forming temporary and dynamic alliances, they are organizing policies of resistance and solidarity against authority, challenging and defeating it.
In this context, what needs to be done is to use both the actual and virtual environments as much as possible in order to regress the hegemony of the power that dominates the public sphere and to create a counter-hegemony of the working people and the oppressed.