Public opinion, or popular opinion, is the collective opinion on a specific topic or voting intention relevant to society. It is the people's views on matters affecting them. The term originates from France, and first appeared in the 17th century, though writers had identified the importance of the opinion of the people long before this. Prior to the advent of mass media, public fora such as coffee houses and gentlemen's clubs were used as exchanges of opinion and some reputable locations had great influence.
In the 21st century, public opinion is widely thought to be heavily influenced by the media; many studies have been undertaken which look at the different factors which influence public opinion. Politicians and other people concerned with public opinion often attempt to influence it using advertising or rhetoric. One of the struggles of public opinion is how it can be influenced by misinformation.
The term "public opinion" was derived from the French opinion publique, which was first used in 1588 by Michel de Montaigne in the second edition of his Essays (ch. XXII).
The French term also appears in the 1761 work Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Precursors of the phrase in English include William Temple's "general opinion" (appearing in his 1672 work On the Original and Nature of Government) and John Locke's "law of opinion" (appearing in his 1689 work An Essay Concerning Human Understanding).
The emergence of public opinion as a significant force in the political realm dates to the late 17th century, but opinion had been regarded as having singular importance much earlier. Medieval fama publica or vox et fama communis had great legal and social importance from the 12th and 13th centuries onward. Later, William Shakespeare called public opinion the "mistress of success" and Blaise Pascal thought it was "the queen of the world".
In his treatise, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding c, John Locke considered that man was subject to three laws: the divine law, the civil law and most importantly in Locke's judgement, the law of opinion or reputation.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Le cours présente les enjeux mondiaux actuels liés à la communication instantanée et aux médias sociaux. L'approche interdisciplinaire intègre les SHS et les sciences de l'ingénieur et initie au trava
This course will develop logical reasoning and argumentation skills to enable you to influence decision making. You will achieve this by learning how to represent and communicate your reasoning as ar
L'objectif du cours est que les étudiants acquièrent les bases théoriques et méthodologiques d'une approche sociologique des médias (particulièrement des médias sportifs) et qu'ils puissent s'en servi
In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Framing can manifest in thought or interpersonal communication. Frames in thought consist of the mental representations, interpretations, and simplifications of reality. Frames in communication consist of the communication of frames between different actors. Framing is a key component of sociology, the study of social interaction among humans.
Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is "a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability". This approach looks at society through a macro-level orientation, which is a broad focus on the social structures that shape society as a whole, and believes that society has evolved like organisms. This approach looks at both social structure and social functions.
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features: Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.
This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of nature. We stud ...
Piscataway2024
Delves into the theory of conversion by Moscovici, exploring minority influence through a long process and the importance of consistency.
Delves into the historical evolution of science as a public culture, exploring the transition from secrecy to openness in scientific practices.
Covers defining independent concepts in classes and creating more complex classes through inheritance.
Social media studies often collect data retrospectively to analyze public opinion. Social media data may decay over time and such decay may prevent the collection of the complete dataset. As a result, the collected dataset may differ from the complete data ...
The adaptive social learning paradigm helps model how networked agents are able to form opinions on a state of nature and track its drifts in a changing environment. In this framework, the agents repeatedly update their beliefs based on private observation ...