“Taking the Temperature of the Room”
“Taking the Temperature of the Room”
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“测量房间的温度”
DOI：
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Shannon C. McGregor
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Shannon C. McGregor
在二十世纪的大部分时间里，公众舆论几乎与民意调查类似。社交媒体颠覆了舆论赖以构建的社会、技术和沟通偶发事件。这项研究记录了政治专业人士如何利用社交媒体来了解公众，并对竞选实践以及舆论本身的研究提出了重要的影响。对 2016 年美国总统竞选活动中 13 名专业人士的深度采访分析，详细介绍了他们如何利用社交媒体来理解和代表民意。我将社交媒体的这些用途映射到一个理论模型上，考虑定量和定性测量，以达到工具和象征目的。竞选活动利用社交媒体数据来推断和象征民意，是竞选活动与支持者之间关系的新发展。这些新的舆论工具和符号是由竞选活动塑造的，并推动新闻报道（McGregor 2019），突出了政治媒体系统的混合逻辑（Chadwick 2017）。我提出的模型引起了人们对定性数据的急需关注，这是社交媒体在理解公众舆论方面的一个新颖方面。使用社交媒体数据来了解公众，尽管存在代表性问题，可能会反驳长期以来对调查的批评——特别是调查没有揭示舆论形成的等级、社会或公共方面（Blumer 1948；Herbst 1998；Cramer 2016）。该模型强调需要阐明通过社交媒体可以理解和不能理解的公众舆论的哪些内容。
For most of the twentieth century, public opinion was nearly analogous with polling. Enter social media, which has upended the social, technical, and communication contingencies upon which public opinion is constructed. This study documents how political professionals turn to social media to understand the public, charting important implications for the practice of campaigning as well as the study of public opinion itself. An analysis of in-depth interviews with 13 professionals from 2016 US presidential campaigns details how they use social media to understand and represent public opinion. I map these uses of social media onto a theoretical model, accounting for quantitative and qualitative measurement, for instrumental and symbolic purposes. Campaigns’ use of social media data to infer and symbolize public opinion is a new development in the relationship between campaigns and supporters. These new tools and symbols of public opinion are shaped by campaigns and drive press coverage (McGregor 2019), highlighting the hybrid logic of the political media system (Chadwick 2017). The model I present brings much-needed attention to qualitative data, a novel aspect of social media in understanding public opinion. The use of social media data to understand the public, for all its problems of representativeness, may provide a retort to long-standing criticisms of surveys—specifically that surveys do not reveal hierarchical, social, or public aspects of opinion formation (Blumer 1948; Herbst 1998; Cramer 2016). This model highlights a need to explicate what can—and cannot—be understood about public opinion via social media.