WAPOR 64th Annual Conference
Public Opinion and the Internet
Short Research Paper
Memetic Emergence of Public Opinion
Marco Toledo Bastos (University of São Paulo / University of Frankfurt)
1. Paper Outline
The aim of this paper is to discuss the propagation of opinions expressed on the
Internet in view of a historical development of public opinion. In order to address that,
the paper examines the debate concerning the public opinion by the theories of Walter
Lippmann (1961), Niklas Luhmann (2000), Jürgen Habermas (1987) and Dirk Baecker
(2005). The relationship between media and the public opinion is defined by the
historical emergence of forms of coding between communication agents, previously
comprising of senders and receivers (peer to peer communication), broadcasting (mass
communication) and networks of nodes (digital communication). The dynamics of
public opinion in digital environments is depicted as a form shaped by a network of
nodes, so that we suggest the memeotic diagram to model the distribution of messages
and opinions in digital networks. The paper offers a synthesis of the literature on
public opinion and introduces the methods and the results from a quantitative
investigation into the viral propagation of messages in the Twitter network.
2. Public Opinion
The concept of public opinion was established as an empirical aggregate of
individual opinions, ideas and agendas within the adult population. The concept has
been used to address the organic complex of opinions that different people grasp
together, not individually, and how the sum of opinions affect society. The concept
itself gained acceptance in the eighteenth century with the rise of the public sphere
centered upon the Enlightenment in Europe. The English term derived from the French
l’opinion publique, coined in 1588 by Michel de Montaigne (Lemert 1981). Because
of this conceptual dependency, the development of the concept of public opinion is
mirrored on the history of the modern era and the process of urbanization. According
to Fred Cutler (1999), it was Jeremy Bentham who first presented a solid theory about
the public opinion. The British philosopher and social reformer claimed that public
opinion could pressure lawmakers and assure that rules were to be made for the best of
everyone.
For Luhmann (1990) public opinion is a paradox that pictures the invisible
power of the visible. As a technological outcome from writing—which creates the
public and afterwards the public opinion—it would not be related to the opinion of
individuals, to a certain social judgment or to a general agreement in relation to a
certain topic. Instead, it would be a network of communications that no one is required
to take part of. This network would be significantly entropic and any action towards
public opinion would require a great deal of labor. In accordance to his concept of
communication, public opinion does not convey any transmission of information, but
rather disseminates information within a system. The public opinion would be a
medium by which forms are created and dissolved through continuous communication.
It would be a bottom-up social reality based on the very reproduction of
communication (Maresch 1999).
Luhmann (1990: 174) portrays the public opinion by way of the binary
medium/form polarization, where media are the weak gathering of overabundant
elements and forms represent the provisory selection of such overabundant elements in
a strong cluster. Public opinion is therefore the temporary gathering of consciousness,
by means of a structural coupling in view of a specific horizon of meaning. The lack of
permanent properties makes public opinion a somewhat imaginary reference to which
consciousness refers, at the same time the consciousness are not permeable to the
public opinion. Mass media shape the public opinion but do not transfer contents to it.
As a compound of auto-organized atomistic opinions, public opinion is produced by
temporal and quantitative forms as an autonomous and differentiated and self-created
reality. This autonomous reality allows an observer to observe the medium while all
the observers are mirrored on it as public opinion (Luhmann 1990: 181).
3. #FreeVenezuela Network
The data collected for this paper refers to a story very similar to the role Twitter
played during the 2009-2010 Iranian election and the recent political events in Tunisia
and Egypt. The data was collected from January 22, 2010 to May 2, 2010 concerning
to the hashtag #FreeVenezuela, the tag used to categorize posts related to the socioeconomic situation in Venezuela. This particular hashtag attracted a great deal of
protesters reaching the third position in Twitter’s trending topics at the beginning of
February 2010. It was on January 22, 2010 that the first tweet with the hashtag
#FreeVenezuela was posted on Twitter as a result of a protest against the banning of
cable station Radio Caracas Television (RCTV) and five other stations by Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez.
The context of the Venezuelan uprising with the hashtag #FreeVenezuela
relates to a moment of economic crisis, political uncertainty and threats against
freedom of speech in Venezuela. The data collected shows an increasing amount of
tweets collected around the aforementioned hashtag as protests reached the streets and
news of the protests made its way on to mainstream media and social networks
Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. Based on this hypothesis, our paper sheds some light
on the powerful role that social networking websites are playing in the organization of
social and political consent and dissent.
4. Twitter Memeoids
The theoretical framework focuses on the hashtag memeotic emergence in
Twitter using a set of theories and methodologies to mine and analyze social media
data. The word memeotic depicts a pattern of information replication that contrasts to
the idea of viral emergence of messages and information. While viral refers to a
reproduction pattern in which interaction and viral replication are achieved against
host defenses, the memeotic replication refers to a pattern different from virus
mechanics because it achieves a state of stable symbiosis with the host (Twitter
network). Memeotic revolves around the work of Richard Dawkins (2006), who used
the term meme to describe a unit of human cultural transmission analogous to the
gene, arguing that replication also happens in culture though in a different sense. For
Dawkins, a meme is a unit of information but also a pattern that can influence its
surroundings––that is, it has causal agency––and can propagate.
We described Twitter as an evolutionary system constituted by two main
agents. Individual tweets are named memes (M) that are reproduced through
retweeting and are subject to mutation (e. g. by changing parts of the message or
including markup conventions like hashtags and links). Memoids (Mmo) are entities
that reproduce inside tweets and that improve tweets replicability rates, but are also
replicating units themselves (e. g. hashtags and links). A Mmo is not restricted to
unique tweets lineages; in fact, it will frequently infect various memes simultaneously.
Memes have the following state variables: length, idiom, hashtag richness, http links
richness, RT count, AT count, and user (the person who published the tweet).
Memoids have the following state variables: class (hashtag or http link), length and
subject. Last, the Followers Networks (FN) are virtual communities that provide an
environment where users can receive, produce, and replicate tweets. The results of
these tweets provide a further environment in which M and Mmo are reproduced.
@ Network
RT Network
#FreeVenezuela
Friends/Followers Network
M / Mmo variables
@ edges indegree
@ edges outdegree
FF edges indegree
FF edges outdegree
Followers Count
Friends Count
Date of account creation
Statuses count
#FreeVenezuela RT outdegree correlation
49,90%
33,67%
7,51%
8,54%
6,92%
4,98%
0,93%
8,55%
NUMBER OF TWEETS PER USER
73,93%
5. Conclusion
The paper takes into consideration that the emergence of political hashtags in
Twitters network are the direct outcome of economic crisis, political uncertainty and
threats against freedom of speech. In the conclusion, the paper argues that Twitter
trending topics form a digital public opinion that challenges the “rich-get-richer”
dynamics described by Barabási and Albert (1999) as a common feature in systems
such as genetic networks and the World Wide Web. Even though the propagation of
opinion in Twitter networks follows a scale free network, there is no substantial
evidence of any power-law distribution. This is mainly because unlike systems based
on power-law distribution, the propagation of opinions in Twitter networks does not
rely on scale invariance, but rather on effective scale variation—that is, on memeotic
variance. In the final conclusion, the paper presents the “clickers” hypothesis, which
sheds light on the very powerful role of social networking websites in the organization
of social and political consent or dissent in today’s world.
6. References
Cutler, Fred (1999), 'Jeremy Bentham and the Public Opinion Tribunal', The Public Opinion
Quarterly, 63 (3), 321-46.
Baecker, D. (2005). Form und Formen der Kommunikation. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999). Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks.
Science, 286(5439), 509-512.
Dawkins, R. (2006). The selfish gene (30th anniversary ed.). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Habermas, J. (1987). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Lemert, James B. (1981), Does mass communication change public opinion after all? : a new
approach to effects analysis (Chicago: Nelson-Hall) x, 253 p.
Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in Group Dynamics. Human Relations, 1(2).
Lippmann, W. (1961). Public opinion. New York,: Macmillan.
Luhmann, Niklas (1990), Soziologische Aufklärung 5: Konstruktivistische Perspektiven (5;
Opladen: Westdt. Verl.).
Luhmann, N. (2000). The Reality of the Mass Media. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Maresch, Rudolf (ed.), (1999), Kommunikation, Medien, Macht (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp) 450.
White, D. M. (1964). People, Society and Mass Communications. London: CollierMacmillan.
7. Authors
Marco Toledo Bastos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Philosophical
Studies of Communication from the University of São Paulo and a researcher of the
Research Network for Media Anthropology (FAMe - JWG University of Frankfurt).
Rafael Luis Galdini Raimundo, Rodrigo Travitzki de Oliveira and Paulo Guimarães
Júnior have contributed to this research.
8. Contact
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