Datafication of Public Opinion and the Public Sphere: How Extraction Replaced Expression of Opinion

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 public create, articulate and express public opinion by means of reflexive publicity within an established democratic public culture. Specifically, it is focused on three central topics:

a general historical transformation from opining - essentially some people’s view of what the public thought - through the identification of public opinion in opinion polls, up to the contemporary establishment of what people think/want using computer-based analysis of the big data available from digital records, in which the enlightenment idea of public expression of opinion has been replaced by the technology of extracting opinions;
the origins and consequences, and the similarities and differences of the rise and fall of two related concepts - public opinion and the public sphere - in historically particular periods, which have in common that they both lie in the boundary area between normative-theoretical and empirical orientation and suffer from unreliable definition and operationalization, which can only be resolved by a closer connection between the two concepts and areas. a specific historical intervention created by the domestication of the German concept OEffenntlichkeit in English as the public sphere, heralding a new critical impetus in theory and research of publicness at a time when critical social thought sharply criticised and even abandoned the notion of public opinion due to its predominantly administrative use.