This article examines how platform infrastructures reshape the experiential and normative foundations of publicness as a principle of collective orientation. It argues that contemporary digital environments organise visibility, attention and affect through an algorithmic organisation of the sensible that aligns perception with data extraction, behavioural prediction and episodic intensification, thereby reconfiguring the conditions under which public experience acquires epistemic and democratic significance. To conceptualise this condition, the article develops the notion of aesthetic colonisation as the process through which platforms reorganise sensibility, temporal rhythm and the experienceability of publics. In dialogue with Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience, Benjamin’s analysis of shock and the dissolution of Erfahrung, Rosa’s theory of social acceleration and Splichal’s reconceptualisation of publicness, the article shows how contractual publics stabilise the procedural conditions of participation and how gig publics materialise collectivity through rhythmic peaks of circulation and performative visibility. The final sections outline an aesthetics of formation grounded in aesthetic literacy, democratic infrastructures and public-service communication models oriented to reflective publicity. The renewal of democratic publicness depends on environments capable of sustaining shared attention, temporal depth and the experiential resources required for collective understanding.
Ferreira Gil Baptista (Mon,) studied this question.