Slavko Splichal is Professor of Communication and Public Opinion at the University of Ljubljana’s Faculty of Social Sciences, fellow of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and member of Academia Europaea. He is founder and director of the European Institute for Communication and Culture and editor of its journal Javnost – The Public.

• Prologue; List of Figures and Tables; Introduction; 1 The Rise of Public Opinion as the Voice of the People, Subversive Beginnings, Seeds of Doubt, Conceptual Challenges and Controversies in Sociology and Political Science; 2 Quantification of Public Opinion and the Disempowerment of the Public, The Quantitative Revolution in the Social Sciences, Polling: Operationalisation, Emanation or Negation of Public Opinion?, The Curse of Translation: The Invisible Becomes Visible; 3 Re-Emergence of Publicness in the Public Sphere, The Rediscovery of Critical Publicness ; The Perplexity of Publicness: Öffentlichkeitversus the Public Sphere; The Deliberative Turn and the Loss of the Public; Antagonists, Agonists, Mini-Publics and Publics as Actors in the Public Sphere; 4 Datafication of the Public Sphere and Threats to Publicness, The Rise of Opinion Mining and the ‘Networked Public Sphere’, Opinion Mining versus Polling, Technology and the Democratic Potentials of Publicness, Manipulating ‘Public Opinion’: From Propaganda Techniques to Invisible Algorithms; 5 Critical Epistemic Value of Publicness and Public-Worthiness, News Overload and Crisis of Journalism, Fostering Public Discourse: From Newsworthiness to Public-Worthiness, The Clash of Rationalities and the Need to Rehabilitate Publicness, Rearticulating the Critical Epistemic Value of Publicness: VARMIL, Conclusion, References, Index

“Slavko Splichal’s book is an excellent, outstanding, highly important and extremely topical analysis of how datafication has colonised publicness, public opinion, and the public sphere. This work is a must-read for everyone who cares about democracy and is interested in how we can save democracy and democratic communication(s) from the threats they face today.”—Professor Christian Fuchs, author of “Social Media: A Critical Introduction” and “Communication and Capitalism: A Critical Theory.”