Datafication of Public Opinion and the Public Sphere

Slavko Splichal is Professor of Communication and Public Opinion at the University of Ljubljana's Faculty of Social Sciences, fellow of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and member of Academia Europaea. He is founder and director of the European Institute for Communication and Culture and editor of its journal Javnost - The Public.

The book, anchored in stimulating debates about the enlightenment ideas of publicness, analyses historical changes in the core phenomena of publicness: possibilities, conditions and obstacles to developing a public sphere in which publics create, articulate and express public opinion by means of reflexive publicity within an established democratic public culture.

Prologue; List of Figures and Tables; Introduction; 1 The Rise of Public Opinion as the Voice of the People, Subversive Beginnings, Seeds of Doubt, Conceptual Challenges and Controversies in Sociology and Political Science; 2 Quantification of Public Opinion and the Disempowerment of the Public, The Quantitative Revolution in the Social Sciences, Polling: Operationalisation, Emanation or Negation of Public Opinion?, The Curse of Translation: The Invisible Becomes Visible; 3 Re-Emergence of Publicness in the Public Sphere, The Rediscovery of Critical Publicness ; The Perplexity of Publicness: Öffentlichkeitversus the Public Sphere; The Deliberative Turn and the Loss of the Public; Antagonists, Agonists, Mini-Publics and Publics as Actors in the Public Sphere; 4 Datafication of the Public Sphere and Threats to Publicness, The Rise of Opinion Mining and the 'Networked Public Sphere', Opinion Mining versus Polling, Technology and the Democratic Potentials of Publicness, Manipulating 'Public Opinion': From Propaganda Techniques to Invisible Algorithms; 5 Critical Epistemic Value of Publicness and Public-Worthiness, News Overload and Crisis of Journalism, Fostering Public Discourse: From Newsworthiness to Public-Worthiness, The Clash of Rationalities and the Need to Rehabilitate Publicness, Rearticulating the Critical Epistemic Value of Publicness: VARMIL, Conclusion, References, Index