Talking to my community elsewhere: Bringing together networked public spheres and the concept of translocal communities.

On the social web, public spheres emerge from communication among interacting networks of social actors. Many networks form larger communities with distinct interaction patterns, which are bound together by a shared imagination of communion based on identities, interests, or experiences. We argue that communities provide spatial anchoring for public communication processes on the social web. Empirically, communities have tended to be locally rooted. However, with increasing mobility and digitization, community members and their actions are simultaneously transcending the boundaries of cities, nations, and languages, becoming translocal phenomena. In other words, while spatially rooted, communities are also translocally distributed social underpinnings for public spheres that emerge from social media communication. As public communication becomes disembedded from national territories, public sphere theory will benefit from implementing the meso-level concept of translocal communities to reorder the relationship between space and the public sphere.