Thesis supervisor(s)
: Patrice Flichy, Sylvain Parasie
“Know what people think
.” This slogan, displayed on the home page of British company Brandwatch’s website, sums up the promise of the new industry associated with studying opinions on the web: finally knowing what people think, without even having to ask them. Since the mid-2000s, a group of agencies, start-ups, and software publishers have been offering to reveal the opinions of the general public based on millions of daily posts on social media: tweets
, blog posts, forum messages, and online press comments. This massively available data is used by a wide variety of players and tools to measure the reputation of major brands and companies, reactions to advertising campaigns or televised debates, and emerging consumer practices. What they all have in common is an interest in the unsolicited opinions of internet users. This approach has also been hugely successful in recent years: in 2015, ten years after the first companies in this field were created, the social media analysis
software industry generated $2.2 billion in revenue, according to Markets and Markets, which also forecasts growth in this market to $17.9 billion in 2019.
Far from the positivism surrounding these technologies and from constructivist criticism external to its subject, this thesis seeks to describe the emergence of a new type of mediation that uses conversational traces from social media to measure opinion, thereby renewing the epistemological and political content of this category. Starting from the hypothesis of a plurality of forms of opinion and the mechanisms that measure it, we follow an extremely varied set of models, constructed by start-ups and innovative companies. We are initially interested in attempts to redefine the notion of representativeness by sampling mobilized and influential audiences. Secondly, we study the model that seems to be prevailing in this market, based on software aimed at the exhaustive and continuous indexing of traces of online conversation. Measuring opinion as a continuous flow of singular events, these instruments break definitively with the idea of representativeness and update a grammar of opinion as a collective and discursive activity, attentive to the media and relational dynamics of online discussion. This indexical regime of knowledge of opinions therefore abandons the quantification of majorities and minorities in favor of measuring mobilizations and movements of opinion.
Thesis defense on Friday, December 9, 2016
Doctorate
: Sociology
Year of thesis registration
: September 20, 2011
Doctoral school
: OMI – Organization, Markets, Institutions
Thesis jury:
Loïc Blondiaux, Professor at Paris I Sorbonne University
Dominique Cardon, Associate Professor at Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée University
Patrice Flichy, Professor Emeritus at Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée University (director)
Alexandre Mallard, Director of Research at Mines ParisTech
Cécile Méadel, Professor at Paris II Panthéon-Assas University
Sylvain Parasie, Senior Lecturer at Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée University (co-director)