Warner 123: "All of the verbs for public agency are verbs for private reading, transposed upward to the aggregate of readers. Readers may scrutinize, ask, reject, opine, decide, judge, and so on. Publics can do exactly these things. And nothing else. Publics--unlike mobs or crowds--are incapable of any activity that cannot be expressed through such a verb."
however, "counterpublics tend to be those in which this ideology of reading does not have the same privilege," perhaps because "embodied sociality is too important to them" or because "they might depend more heavily on performance spaces than on print"
"To take such attributions of public agency seriously, however, we would need to inhabit a culture with a different language ideology, a different social imaginary" (see note on queer counterpublics)