Abstract
This essay reviews conceptual as well as historical backgrounds of public opinion and emphasizes the relevance of phenomenological perspectives for public opinion research. The phenomenological concepts, such as being-in-the-world, intersubjectivity, intercorporeality, communicative reason, and in-betweens, become all the more relevant to public opinion research than ever. The reason is that the essential nature of the interactive digital communication technologies, on which contemporary public opinion formations are based, can be adequately captured by the phenomenological concepts. Particularly, this essay focuses on the relevance of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, or being-in-the-world, for better understanding of the nature of public opinion in the age of the Internet and the digital media.
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Notes
- 1.
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion —Our Social Skin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); V. Price, Public Opinion (Newbury Park: Sage, 1992).
- 2.
In Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence.
- 3.
Hermann Oncken, quoted in Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence, 59.
- 4.
Dewey (1927); Price, Public Opinion ; Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
- 5.
Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (Northwestern University Press, 1967); Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage Books, 1968); Winch, Trying to Make Sense (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
- 6.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology : The Origins, Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]).
- 7.
Joohan Kim and Eun Joo Kim, “Theorizing Dialogic Deliberation: Everyday Political Talk as Communicative Action and Dialogue ,” Communication Theory (2008), 18, 51–70; R. O. Wyatt, E. Katz, and J. Kim, “Bridging the Spheres: Political and Personal Conversation in Public and Private Spaces,” Journal of Communication (2000), 50, 71–92; R. O. Wyatt, J. Kim, and E. Katz, “How Feeling Free to Talk Affects Ordinary Political Conversation, Purposeful Argumentation, and Civic Participation,” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (2000): 77, 99–114.
- 8.
John Durham Peters, “Historical tensions in the concept of public opinion ,” in T. Glasser and C. Salmon eds., Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995); Price, Public Opinion.
- 9.
Gabriel Tarde, L’ opinion et la foule (Paris: Alcan, 1898/1901), 3.
- 10.
Kant, in Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence, 60.
- 11.
Peters, “Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion ,” 5. Plato believed that politics was about technē or skill, conducted according to scientific knowledge or epistēmē. Therefore, he maintained that the polis should be ruled by a philosopher-king, who has epistēmē or “clear and scientific knowledge,” rather than by common people, who have only doxa. Aristotle, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of practical wisdom and the common sense of doxa. He believed that “the sciences of action , namely politics and ethics , require grounding in a different kind of knowledge than epistēmē. Because all human action is historical, practical, and contingent” (Ibid., 4). Indeed, the ancient Greeks actually used doxa for decisions reached in political assemblies: “doxa thus also has the sense of consensus or views held in common” (Ibid.).
- 12.
1990.
- 13.
“Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion .”
- 14.
Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence, 175.
- 15.
1960 [1895].
- 16.
1969 [1901], 277.
- 17.
1969 [1901], 281.
- 18.
1989.
- 19.
Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 89.
- 20.
Ibid., 96.
- 21.
Ibid., 92.
- 22.
Ibid., 98.
- 23.
Ibid., 90.
- 24.
Ibid., 95.
- 25.
Ibid., 93.
- 26.
Hans Speier, “Historical Development of Public Opinion ,” American Journal of Sociology (Jan. 1950): 376–388, 376.
- 27.
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1942), 242.
- 28.
Pamela Johnston Conover and Donald D. Searing, “Studying ‘Everyday Political Talk’ in the Deliberative System,” Acta Politica (2005), 40, 269–283; Michael X. Delli Carpini, Fay Lomax Cook, and Lawrence R. Jacobs, “Public Deliberation, Discursive Participation, and Citizen Engagement: A Review of the Empirical Literature,” Annual Review of Political Science (2004), 7, 315–344.
- 29.
Jürgen Habermas, “Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research,” Communication Theory (2006), 16, 411–426.
- 30.
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, Vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 1973 [1888]).
- 31.
Ibid., 14.
- 32.
Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970).
- 33.
In Habermas (1994), 211.
- 34.
Arendt, On Violence, 41.
- 35.
Tarde, L’ opinion et la foule, 33.
- 36.
Ibid., 34.
- 37.
Susan T. Fiske and Shelley E. Taylor, Social Cognition (New York: Random House, 1984).
- 38.
L. Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957).
- 39.
John Zaller and Stanley Feldman, “A Simple Model of the Survey Responses: Answering Versus Revealing Preferences,” American Journal of Political Science (1992), 96, 579–616; Ibid., 586.
- 40.
Ibid., 582. Indeed, Zaller in Politics as Usual: The Rise and Fall of Candidate Perot presented at the NES, Philadelphia (1994), argues, in advancing his question-answering model, that for most survey respondents on most items, “there is a fairly but not indefinitely wide range within which, whether they recognize it or not, they are ambivalent.” Pollsters themselves participate in the discursive process, then, by presenting respondents questions that are largely framed by elite discourse, reporting the results, and thereby helping to crystallize opinion .
- 41.
1998.
- 42.
Joohan Kim, “Communication, Reason , and Deliberative Democracy,” Journal of Communication (1999), 49, 137–144; Diana C. Mutz, Hearing the Other Side: Deliberative Versus Participatory Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Joohan Kim, Robert O. Wyatt, and Elihu Katz, “News, Talk, Opinion , Action : The Part Played by Conversation in Deliberative Democracy, Political Communication (1999), 16, 361–385.
- 43.
Price, Public Opinion .
- 44.
Ibid., 2.
- 45.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 137.
- 46.
New York Times, March 20, 1996.
- 47.
Ibid., 183.
- 48.
Ibid., 183–4.
- 49.
Ibid.
- 50.
Erzahi (1995), 159.
- 51.
Habermas (1994).
- 52.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 181.
- 53.
Currently, sending and downloading audio-visual digital-beings from the Internet can take a long time if you are connected via phone line with a modem. But this problem will be solved very soon with optic fibers. Now American telephone companies are replacing roughly 5 percent of their copper wires with fiber every year. At this rate, within just 20 years, the whole network will be based on optic fibers; Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). According to Negroponte, “We literally do not know how many bits per second we can send down a fiber. Recent research results indicate that we are close to being able to deliver 1000 billion bits per second. This means that a fiber the size of a human hair can deliver every issue ever made of the Wall Street Journal in less than one second. Transmitting data at that speed, a fiber can deliver a million channels of television concurrently” (Ibid., 23).
- 54.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).
- 55.
Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1952/1989).
- 56.
Hwa Yol Jung, “Vico and the Critical Genealogy of the Body Politic,” Rivista di Studi Italiani (1993b), 11(1), 39–66, 45.
- 57.
Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer, Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces Between People, Bits and Atoms, paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA (1997); Chris Dodge, The Bed: A Medium for Intimate Communication, paper presented at the Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA (1997); Small (1997).
- 58.
Ishii and Ullmer, Tangible Bits, 3.
- 59.
Steven Mann, “ ‘Eudaemonic Eye:’ ‘Personal Imaging’ and Wearable Computing as Result of Deconstructing HCI; Towards Greater Creativity and Self-Determination,” paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA (1997).
- 60.
“The goal of the ‘Existential User Interface’ (EUI) is not increased productivity (e.g., making individuals more useful to society), but, rather, to reclaim the personal space (prosthetic territory) lost by invasive technology . A good example of ‘existential media’ is clothing. Clothing affords us a great deal of self-determination, and serves as a useful metaphor for ‘existential media’ (It is no coincidence that clothing also formed the substrate upon which the ‘existential computer’ invention was first realized). The SONY “Walkman” is another example of ‘existential media’ ” (Ibid., 2).
- 61.
Mann, Eudaemonic Eye, 2.
- 62.
Hwa Yol Jung, “Taking Responsibility Seriously,” in Lester Embree and Kevin Thompson (Eds.), Phenomenology of the Political (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 7.
- 63.
“The body is the living seat and the material condition of sociality. As the co-presence of the self and the Other, sociality is inconceivable without bodies-in-relation. It is made of fleshly connected selves, that is, it is intercorporeal… [T]he factum brutum that the body is the active mode of being in the world and that it is the primordial location of the social. The body is indeed a carnal interbeing” (Ibid., 7–8).
- 64.
Ishii and Ullmer, Tangible Bits; Scott Brave and Andrew Dahley, inTouch: A Medium for Haptic Interpersonal Communication (MIT Media Laboratory, 1997).
- 65.
Brave and Dahley, inTouch, 1.
- 66.
Dodge (1997), 2.“A bed serves as a unique interface between people because it is a space that is shared physically with two whole bodies. The presence and actions of our other partners are immediately communicated to us because we are always in close physical contact. We can feel their rhythmic breathing, hear their quiet whispers, and sense their body warmth. Because of this closeness, we have an acutely heightened awareness of the physical and emotional state of one another. Therefore, this bed object is very “loaded” with meaning, as we have strong emotional associations towards such intimate and personal experiences. Work by Paul Sermon has explored the use of video projection to connect two remotely located beds to form a virtual “telepresence” between people” (Ibid.).
- 67.
“When both participants climb into their beds and hold their body pillows, the participants’ presence is initially represented through both the warming up and the appearance of a slow, steady physical pulsing in the other’s body pillow… one can feel the heartbeat and the body warmth of the other. If one person begins to get restless, i.e., he/she moves about in the bed, the movement is communicated through an increase of the rate and intensity of the heartbeat in the other’s body pillow. When something is spoken, a computer analyzes the quality of the audio in terms of amplitude (softness/loudness).…The audio analyzer also classifies spoken conversation and “airy” noises such as breathing or blowing. If one participant blows air, this event is transmitted and reconstructed remotely through the blowing and swaying of the other’s curtains, as if the breath had bridged the physical distance to change the air flow” (Ibid., 5).
- 68.
Jung, “Vico and the Critical Genealogy,” 46.
- 69.
Ibid., 45.
- 70.
Ibid., 55.
- 71.
As such, the primacy of alterity and relationality is the virtue of the Internet: “Alterity and relationality are born twins…In the ethical , however, alterity is primarily to the self. The ethical or ethics is always already social because it involves approval and disapproval” (Jung, “Taking Responsibility Seriously,” 14).
- 72.
Jung, “Vico and the Critical Genealogy,” 54.
- 73.
Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Joohan Kim, Dialogue Concerning Scientific Construction of Reality: A Dialogue for Dialogic Discourse in Science, paper presented at the International Communication Conference (Chicago, 1996).
- 74.
OpenDebate (www.opendebate.com), The Internet Voice (www.virtua.com/voice), or Mega Forums Discussion Web Rings (www.opendebate.com/webrings).
- 75.
Jung, “Taking Responsibility Seriously.”
- 76.
New York Times, E8, June 18, 1998.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 182.
- 79.
Ibid., 183.
- 80.
Ishii and Ullmer, Tangible Bits; Small, 1997; M. Pell, Overlaying Motion, Time and Distance in 3-D Space, paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA (1997); Martin Kurze, Rendering Drawings for Interactive Haptic Perception, paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Atlanta, GA (1997).
- 81.
Ishii and Ullmer, Tangible Bits, 4.
- 82.
The Project focuses on the following three areas: (1) Interactive Surfaces: Transformation of each surface within architectural space (e.g., walls, desktops, ceilings, doors, windows) into an active interface between the physical and virtual worlds; (2) Coupling of Bits and Atoms: Seamless coupling of everyday graspable objects (e.g., cards, books, models) with the digital information that pertains to them; and (3) Ambient Media: Use of ambient media such as sound, light, airflow, and water movement for background interfaces with cyberspace at the periphery of human perception (Ishii and Ullmer, Tangible Bits, 4). Their research prototypes include: (1) Ping Pong Plus, which is a digitally enhanced version of the classic Ping-Pong game. It is played with ordinary, un-tethered paddles and balls, and features a “reactive table” that incorporates sensing, sound, and projection technologies ; (2) MetaDESK, which integrates multiple 2D and 3D graphic displays with an assortment of physical objects and instruments; (3) Luminous Room, which involves the construction of an infrastructure for providing visible information and interaction pervasively throughout an architectural space; (4) ambientRoom, which uses “ambient media”—ambient light, shadow, sound, airflow, water flow—as means for communicating information at the periphery (i.e., background) of human perception. It is designed to employ both the foreground and background of users’ perception. (5) mediaBlocks, which explores the use of physical blocks as containers and controls for digital media such as presentation graphics, photographs, and sounds; and (6) transBOARD, which is a networked digitally-enhanced physical whiteboard designed to explore the concept of interactive surfaces which absorb information from the physical world, transforming this data into bits and distributing it into cyberspace (Ibid., 7–12).
- 83.
Arendt, The Human Condition, 183–4.
- 84.
Ibid., 188.
- 85.
Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 165.
- 86.
“Is it the sum of what is within the world? By no means. Our calling nature, as well as the things that surround us most closely, the intraworldly and our understanding them in that way already presuppose that we understand world…we must strictly distinguish the phenomenological concept of world from the ordinary pre-philosophical concept of world, according to which world means that which is, itself—nature, things, and the universe of being” (Ibid., 165–6).
- 87.
Ibid., 166.
- 88.
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 57.
- 89.
“Knowing is a mode of being of Dasein as being-in-the-world…we thus find phenomenally that knowing is a kind of being of being-in-the-world” (Ibid., 57).
- 90.
Schutz, Collected Papers Vol. I, 141.
- 91.
“The nearest world of every day Dasein is the surrounding world. Our investigation will follow the path from this existential character of average being-in-the-world to the idea of worldliness as such” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 62). “Ontological explication thus finds, as it proceeds, characteristics of being such as substantiality, materiality , extendedness, side-by-sideness…” (Ibid., 63).
- 92.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 53.
- 93.
Ibid., 52.
- 94.
“Being together with” the world…is grounded in being-in…As an existential, “being with” the world never means anything like the being-objectively-present-together of things that occur. There is no such thing as the “being next to each other” of a being called “Dasein ” with another being called “world” (Ibid., 51).
- 95.
Ibid., 53.
- 96.
Ibid.
- 97.
Ibid., 50.
- 98.
Ibid., 151.
- 99.
Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 289.
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Kim, J. (2016). Phenomenology of Public Opinion: Communicative Body, Intercorporeality and Computer-Mediated Communication. In: Jung, H., Embree, L. (eds) Political Phenomenology. Contributions To Phenomenology, vol 84. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27775-2_15
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