Abstract
Slavko Splichal's monograph, Datafication of Public Opinion and the Public Sphere: How Extraction Replaced Expression of Opinion, provides a critical and in-depth analysis of how quantification and datafication have colonised public opinion and the public sphere. It deals mainly with conceptual issues and key instantiations of publicness in terms of public opinion, the public sphere and publicity, and focuses on historical changes in the core phenomena or instantiations of publicness hidden in the current datafication. The book showcases the impact of technological advances, such as polling, data and opinion mining, and algorithms, on publicness. It also follows two intertwined lines of thought: one is critical-explanatory and the other is normative-theoretical.
The book consists of five chapters, plus an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter 1 briefly discusses the early history of social theories of public opinion, which reached the historical pinnacle at the beginning of the 20th century, ‘ending the transition from the former normative-political to the new sociological paradigm in studying publics and public opinion’ (p. 15). It mentions that it was the invention of opinion polls that marked the beginning of the second major wave of research, which then was ended with the growth of opinion mining methods and big data analytics. Chapter 2 elaborates on the development of quantification of public opinion and the disempowerment of the public in social sciences in the 20th century, ranging from the impact of the invention of polling, to the large diminishment of the interest in public opinion in sociological studies by critical theory in the 1970s, to the sudden emergence of the public sphere in the critical scholarly community by the end of the 20th century. It argues that ‘[i]nstead of stimulating the formation and expression of public opinion, polls have become a means of extracting, influencing and manipulating individual (latent) opinions and thus marginalising the social power of public opinion’ (p. 45).
Chapter 3 further addresses the collapse of the concept of public opinion and the birth of its successor – the public-sphere concept. It points out that ‘by surrendering to the commercial and political expansion of opinion polls and promotional and surveillance publicity’ (p. 58), the public and publicity as critical concepts have lost their critical epistemic value in providing accurate knowledge. It then delves into the complexity of the original German concept ‘Öffentlichkeit’ and its English counterpart ‘the public sphere’. The latter is considered unlike Öffentlichkeit /Publicness and ‘difficult to grasp as an abstract normal concept’ (p. 68). Splichal contends that with the digitalisation of communication and the internet, the new technology-driven quantitative approaches, such as data mining, more specifically, opinion mining may have the long-standing conceptual polarisation pertaining to opinion polling ended.
Moving to Chapter 4, the commercialisation of empirical research during the time of big data and datafication of communication is examined. It argues that opinion polls are ‘not a more accurate instrument for measuring public opinion than opinion mining’ (p. 97), and the three main so-called ‘weaknesses’ of opinion mining, regarding the random selection of respondents, the predictive validity of the procedure, and the independence of observation, are actually the weaknesses of polling and the strengths of opinion mining indeed, which offer solutions to the problems arising from conceptualisation of public opinion through opinion polls or surveys. It also criticises the abuse of algorithms, automation and curation systems in computational propaganda that creates disinformation and misinformation and spreads it across social media networks to manipulate users’ opinion and behaviours.
It cannot be denied that the production, distribution, sharing and consumption of news are significantly influenced by the widespread use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the rise of social network sites. The concluding chapter critically analyses the crisis of journalism, and argues that ‘the widespread use of ICTs cannot be ignored when trying to identify the causes of such crisis and thus also of the growing spread of disinformation’ (p. 119). It then introduces the four main components of public-worthiness, namely, news value, popularity, reliability and consequences, and proposes to shift from newsworthiness to develop a ‘public-worthiness algorithm’ in fostering public discourse. It also advocates for ‘strengthen[ing] citizens’ communicative power by fostering education and equalising socio-economic conditions for autonomous public action’ (p. 128). Moreover, it brings forward the six normative components of (the principle of) publicness, including visibility of social transactions, access to communication channels, reflexive publicity, mediation civil society – the state, influencing decisions, and legitimizing power (VARMIL), which are considered ‘indispensable for any democratic governance, whether as constitutive components of the public sphere and publicness or independently of them’ (p. 135).
This is a useful, logical and thought-provoking book with rich content. On the one hand, with the combination of the solid literature review and a number of topics that the author has dealt with over the last 10 years, it provides abundant research material and presents an excellent, important, critical, and extremely topical analysis of how extraction replaced expression of opinion in the age of digital communication. On the other hand, through a historical perspective, it offers a variety of theories concerning the social complexities of the phenomena of publicness and public opinion from different disciplines, covering but not limited to philosophy, political theory, sociology, psychology and economics, and are significantly contributed by prominent representative authors, such as Gabriel Tarde, Ferdinand Tönnies, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Jeremy Bentham, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jürgen Habermas, and the like. It helps readers to reflect on the past, present and future of publicness, and guides them to experience a journey to flourishing theoretical controversies and historical changes. Nonetheless, the book to some extent is a little bit hard to digest, especially for those who lack certain professional knowledge in publicness and democracy studies, since a lot of terminology and academic concepts are embedded in the text and easy to confuse, for example, the concepts of publicness, publicity, the public, public opinion, and the public sphere.
On the whole, Datafication of Public Opinion and the Public Sphere is an impressive and insightful book. Other than raising critical questions about the datafication of the public sphere, the book also suggests ways in which the social sciences can respond to the radical challenges in the field. It is recommended to those who care about democracy and are interested in publicness, digital communication, and democratic communication.