The Concept of

The active publics issue and the question of the construction of publics are relatively recent in communication studies. After an initial period, when mass communication was seen as aiming at a holistic public, massified and passive and, thus, supposedly influenced via "targeted" messages, now the views on what "publics" mean is becoming diversified and nuanced under the influence of literary theories, cultural studies and what was later called "reception studies". Thus, from the "mass public" we got to the concept of "publics". However, in some recent studies, the mere existence of these publics is being questioned.In this paper, we detail the history of theories on the "public" - from the perspective of the public-as-spectator which later became public-as-audience and public-as-actor - and we set ourselves to show how, from theories on the re-active publics, we arrived, through the transformation of television and the emergence of the new IT&C, to the concept of publics as pro-active as a result of media efforts to build this activism