Reconstruction of the Public Sphere in the Socially Mediated Age

Kaoru Endo is a professor of sociology at Gakushuin University

The aim of this book is to establish a basis for resolving the various issues facing modern society by exploring the field of Computational Social Science, which fuses the social and natural sciences. Today, society is threatened by problems concerning the environment, population growth, hunger and epidemics, all of which could lead to the extinction of humankind. However, attempting to resolve these issues is extremely difficult, because of the complex, intertwined factors involved, and because these issues are not just matters related to nature and the environment but also to society.

In this book, we investigate this aporia of the social sciences with the help of big data (which has gained considerable attention in recent years) and techniques such as agent-based simulation. Our aim is to resolve the complex system problems characteristic of the present age. In this regard, the book focuses on specific issues such as the reconstruction of public character in our social-media-saturated modern lifestyle, the current state of social capital, and the resultant social changes.

Discusses how social media and the internet are changing people, interpersonal relationships, and the world

Chapter 1 Public Sphere and Social Capital in the Age of Intermediality: Approach from Computational Social Science.- Part 1 Theory.- Chapter 2 What is Public Opinion?: In the Age of Comlexedly-Mediated Democracy and Scandal Politics.- Chapter 3 Does Agent-based Modeling Flourish in Sociology?: Mind the Gap between Social Theory and Agent-based Models.- Chapter 4 Does the Internet Make People Selfish?: Effects of the Internet on Citizens' Political Attitudes.- Part 2 Empirical Investigation.- Chapter 5 Social Capital on Social Media.- Chapter 6 An Examination of a Novel Information Diffusion Model for Social Media.- Chapter 7 What Are Practical User Attributes in the Social Media Era?: Proposal For User Attribute Extraction From Their Social Capital.- Chapter 8 Measuring Social Change Using Text Data: A Simple Distributional Approach.- Chapter 9 Value co-creative manufacturing methodology with IoT-based smart factory for mass customisation.- Chapter 10 Has the 3.11 Disaster Brought about Conservatism in Japan?.