Welcome to Field Notes, where we’ll be posting updates about the Public Spheres project. Our ultimate goal is to measure the health of public spheres. But before we can do that, we need to answer a more fundamental question: What information is part of the public sphere? In other words, what matters?
Scholars have argued for decades about where to draw the public-sphere boundary. One line of thought, rooted in Habermas and revived by political-communication research, restricts the domain to formal politics and mass-media coverage of “common-good” issues. Cultural theorists - from Nancy Fraser and her counter-publics to today’s platform-studies crowd - insist that art, memes, and subcultural talk matter because they steer attitudes long before policy debates surface. A third camp, influenced by network theory, sidesteps the gate-keeping question entirely and tracks information flows wherever they go, at the cost of analytic overload. Each tradition captures something vital; none offers a practical yardstick for day-to-day measurement.
I’ve wrestled with this problem for years. Without knowing what is in the public sphere, we can’t begin analyzing it. At Yale Law School’s Information Society Project I realized that “relevance” was too fuzzy - and opened the floodgates to subjective bias. Instead, to decide what matters we should gauge an item’s Influence: its potential to shift public opinion. That potential hinges on three factors:
So: Influence (I) = R * S * D
Why multiply rather than tick boxes? Because influence is capped by the weakest factor. A meme seen by millions but low on salience, a crucial white paper no one reads, or a dry briefing that never stirs emotion all end up with low scores. In contrast, content that spreads far, tops the public agenda, and actively tries to persuade scores high. Multiplication lets us grade everything in between - from a dinner-table chat to a presidential debate, a niche subreddit to a thousand-member WhatsApp group, a town-hall livestream to the Super Bowl.
This descriptive tool does not judge what should command attention; it simply maps what does. By replacing the old yes/no gate with a sliding scale, Influence lets us separate wheat from chaff without pretending culture doesn’t matter for the public sphere or that every trending topic deserves equal study. Over the coming period, Field Notes will report back as we put the formula through its paces - tracking, scoring, and, if needed, refining the yardstick itself.