ABSTRACT
Based on fieldwork inside the Information Technology (IT) Department of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), this chapter observes two phenomena of digital interaction with (non-)citizens that the authors analyze as digital administrative publics: First, the presence of administration in arenas of public online discourse like Twitter and Facebook, and, second, the production of the Federal Portal (Bundesportal), a web-based platform for (non-)citizens to apply for governmental services. Both entangle BAMF in market dynamics implicitly transforming applicants into customers that are nudged to continue digital applications, possibly obfuscating underlying logics of bureaucracies. The development of government IT projects produces strong (affective) entanglements of private and public actors’ different sentiments of good bureaucracy and changes the dynamics of affecting and being affected between “applicants” and “bureaucrats” dramatically: It reduces direct reciprocity, and it shapes affective relations through market logics in well-designed digital spaces. Applying Michael Warner’s definition of multiple publics, constituted by the common experience of a participating reading (and clicking) audience, the proposed analytical concept administrative publics denotes the multiple relations between bureaucrats and an audience of (non-)citizens and connotes the sometimes overt, often subtle, affective, and emotional effects of the state on “publics.”
