Sentiment Analysis: From Psychometrics to Psychopolitics

Abstract

The data about our affects, the so-called emotional data, constitute nowadays a valuable commodity, collected and marketed by digital communication platforms. Among the interested in obtaining it are financial and political corporations that base their decisions on information about network user’s affects. There are different ways to generate emotional data, one of which is the sentiment analysis. This article addresses some characteristics of this tool, clarifying its operation and the psychometric knowledges that constitute it. Sentiment analysis is understood not only as a tool for detecting affects, but also for emotional production. It is in this sense that it is possible to outline it — beyond a psychometric instrument — as a psychopolitical apparatus, a technique that operates by instrumentalizing emotions for a capitalization beyond the individual. In this sense, concepts such as “control society” (Deleuze, 1992), “confessional society” (Bauman, 2012/2014), and the very notion of “psychopolitics” (Han, 2014/2014b), are useful to understand aspects of emotional production based on new communication technologies. This article, therefore, aims to contribute to the understanding of an important factor which is still somewhat neglected in studies on big data and surveillance: the monitoring and production of affects as a form of subjective control.