Public Health Michael Warner defines a public, as “an ongoing space of encounter”. A public can be “a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space”, the audience for a lecture or a performance, or “a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself” – the readership of an essay and the analysis, gossip, and response that swirls around it. The public of an online essay might be a few hundred people, or a viral main-character-of-the-day million, spiraling out until people are engaging with its secondary or tertiary products without having read the original. In technology, we use the term to mean “unlocked”, as in a public social media profile. In government, we use it to mean the people of this country, or the province, a more inclusive, flexible, replacement for “citizen”.