Abstract:

Opinion and the Crowd is published by Gabriel Tarde in 1901, in the context in which the written press begins to develop, after a century in which a series of social movements take place whose historical imprint remains strong. The nineteenth century can be described, albeit superficially, as a century of tectonic social movements generated by the technological revolution, industrialization, and the advent of the print media. What does not appear to be fundamentally different from the social movements of previous centuries is that they are larger, gather around them in a shorter time a larger number of people and, especially, at least for a significant part of them, is based on developed social projects. The twentieth century is the century in which audiences are rethought, reanalyzed and reinterpreted. Social networking theories seek to better understand the relationship between the "big world" and the "small world" between audiences in Tarde's sense and immediate social relations. The 21st century shows with the utmost accuracy that the organization of social, economic, political life, and the organization of the world in general, is based on the model of networks. Society as a network, audiences as a network, need new theories to understand, to interpret them. The connection between the organization of the network and the public are practically two coordinates of the explanatory research that will help us to better understand the society.