Theorising the Dynamics of Public Opinion Expression in Digital Spaces

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Christian Baden, whose emphasis is on the theoretical challenges in studying public opinion dynamics in digital spaces. One such challenge is that what people say (loudly and publicly) on the Internet is not inherently representative for overall public opinion; and that public opinion expression on social media also intersects with and is being negotiated through mainstream and alternative media coverage.

Public opinion expression on social media is therefore participatory and subject to an interactive negotiation; the focus here is not on what is being said, but what remains standing after this negotiation process. What is expressed, and where and how, may be affected by whether people feel that it has already been expressed, that they are not safe to express it, that they will be sanctioned for expressing it, that they must perform this expression, etc. Through (de)legitimisation practices some public opinion statements are positioned as consensually legitimate, critiqued as questionable, or sanctioned as unacceptable, and such processes are always contested, civilly or incivilly – these processes reveal an assumed normative order, through explicit responses (e.g. replies) or more low-key endorsement or disendorsement processes (e.g. up- and downvotes).

This also takes place between positioned actors with different power positions within an institutional or quasi-institutional order; an Elon Musk or a well-known journalist or politician has a distinctly different speaking position from an ordinary user. This represents a form of discursive networking with specific sites of gravity, and bounds the only apparently unbounded spaces of the Internet.