The public sphere is increasingly being depicted as a site of inadequately assessed risk when American undergraduates post blogs, videos, and Facebook updates that become viral, prompting others to mutter ‘don’t they know better than to press send?’ In this article, I offer an analytical frame for such posting that does not re-inscribe US tendencies to attribute ignorance or misguided selfishness to unwelcome behavior. In the United States, there are multiple and mutually defining understandings of how publics are constituted. Historically, these ideas often change when Americans respond to the ways new technologies alter how communication is made public or private. This is an ethnographic account of one way that multiple publics are seen to co-exist uneasily as people negotiate the newness of new media. Grounded in my ethnographic research, I explore how cautionary stories about ‘pressing send’ reflect neoliberal concerns about allocating risk and responsibility among individual choice-makers.
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