From “Networked Publics” to “Refracted Publics”: A Companion Framework for Researching “Below the Radar” Studies

Reflecting on a decade (2009–2020) of research on influencer cultures in Singapore, the Asia Pacific, and beyond, this article considers the potential of “below the radar” studies for understanding the fast evolving and growing potentials of subversive, risky, and hidden practices on social media. The article updates technology and social media scholar danah boyd’s foundational work on “networked publics” to offer the framework of “refracted publics.” While “networked publics” arose from media and communication studies of social network sites during the decade of the 2000s, focused on platforms, infrastructure, and affordances, “refracted publics” is birthed from anthropological and sociological studies of internet user cultures during the decade of the 2010s, focused on agentic and circumventive adaptations of what platforms offer them. “Refracted publics” are a product of the landscape of platform data leaks, political protests, fake news, and (most recently) COVID-19, and are creative vernacular strategies to accommodate for perpetual content saturation, hyper-competitive attention economies, gamified and datafied metric cultures, and information distrust. The key conditions (transience, discoverability, decodability, and silosociality) and dynamics (impactful audiences, weaponized contexts, and alternating publics and privates) of “refracted publics” allow cultures, communities, and contents to avoid being registered on a radar, register in misplaced pockets while appearing on the radar, or register on the radar but parsed as something else altogether. They are the strategies of private groups, locked platforms, or ephemeral contents that will continue to thrive alongside the internet for decades to come.