Public Opinion and New Communication Technologies: The Impacts of Big Data on Public Opinion Studies From the Pragmatism Perspective

In this article, we investigate how research on public opinion is influenced by public opinion polls, insofar as they function as a means of inquiry into reality. With increasing datafication of the world, scientific and technological changes emerge and impact the field of public opinion studies. Today, we have traditional opinion polls on the one hand and polls made possible by the advent of Big Data on the other. Beyond being a mere handful of different methodological protocols, each of these models attributes a specific meaning to the expression “public opinion,” taking us back to the old epistemological clash between theory and methodology often observed in this field of study. We describe the main differences between the two models and then, from the perspective of Peirce’s pragmatism as a theory of meaning dependent on social communication, analyze the transition we are going through today, when social media dominates the digital sphere.