Álvaro Vega I Córdoba, Feb 26 (EFE).- A thesis read at the University of Córdoba states that the opinion movement of the great masses is repetitive, “follows a certain pattern and deviates very little from that pattern.”
This was expressed to EFE by the author of the study, Álvaro Maroto Conde (Córdoba, 1978), a computer engineer from the Cordoba University and a musician, for whom “far from seeming very different, in the end the responses are quite similar” in society and repeat, as has been shown in the phenomena studied, through the analysis of the cyberdiscourse generated on Twitter.
To do this, through his thesis, ‘Kelsos Project: Big Data in the analysis of discourse, modeling and prediction of social, cultural and demographic patterns’, he intends to “connect different sciences, specifically computer science and the area of artificial intelligence, which is now in vogue, and with the social study and the area of letters”.
In his opinion, “it seems that they are fighting a bit with each other”, but “really from the union of both and their transversality, large areas of research can be found that perhaps are currently little investigated”.
Actions conducted by the heritage
“Far from seeming that our actions are free, many times they are driven by our heritage or our cultural trend, which ends up making our behavior somewhat predictable or quite predictable, especially from the point of view of trends, of great masses, no longer on an individual level”, he argues.
This has been specified in how behavior patterns overlap on the different occasions in which a case such as the #BlackLivesMatter phenomenon has occurred, as a consequence of the murder of a black person by the Police in the United States.
Maroto points out that from the analysis of the different milestones separated between them three, four and five years, it is concluded that “the response is exactly the same”, both by countries, as in the groups that intervene, the way of diluting or how it was directed to “other groups that had nothing to do with the starting point from the origin of the movement that had made the news jump”.
This is possible because “this cyberdiscourse, already digitized, can be processed by computer equipment, from which the main hypothesis of the study arises: it is possible to characterize patterns of human behavior from the analysis of semiautomatic discourse in large dimensions (big data). “.
For the author of the thesis on mass opinion, “as long as Twitter is geolocated”, it is possible to determine how to bring the behavior closer to smaller groups.
Different uses of Twitter depending on the country
In his thesis, which received an outstanding cum laude rating, he describes that “the uses of Twitter are significantly different in each country.”
“While in Spain the nature of the social network is especially ironic criticism, with a humorous character, in the United States it is essentially practical, with many automated information bots on weather conditions, traffic conditions, information on the stock markets, etc. values, or even job offers in real time”, he details.
In the case of Brazil, “Twitter becomes the official discursive system where the different television and sports programs are commented, reaching a doubling of the volume of tweets in the nation on the dates that coincide with the most popular programs.”
The intention of the Kelsos Project is none other than to “analyze millions of data and messages sent on the Twitter network to predict the social behavior that arises and that we can study, based on the analysis and other information, such as geographic location, or relationships , as follow-up, or retweets, or response among the population, based on movements or social events, sports politicians and any type of event that we may consider relevant”.
The 2018 motion of no confidence
Another of the preliminary studies of the thesis on mass opinion addressed the impact of the different concerts of musical stars around the world, where “although it seems that certain of them can have a very large impact, in reality it was observed that it was not such as it seemed”, an impression that was transmitted through the media that leads one to believe that “the scope is much greater”.
A third case analyzed for the thesis was Pedro Sánchez’s motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy in 2018, which despite capturing the attention of published opinion, was not what he sent on Twitter during its development in Spain and that even the sovereignist process of that year “represented more agitation and reaction on the part of the population than the motion itself” with respect to both politicians, according to the academic study.
For the director of the thesis, the professor of Philosophy Manuel Bermúdez, the work “has reached a conclusion that is devastating, that the apparent freedom with which public opinion works in the 21st century is just that, apparent.”
In his opinion, Maroto has generated “a formidable tool, which can also be the beginning of further developments in this line, because with his work he allows a very detailed analysis of how Twitter is beating.” EFE