Keywords: Social media, big data, sentiment analysis, and emerging technologies

By opening the possibility for each user to be a media sender and receiver at the same time, and by structuring the formation and development of public opinion within networks, social media have been generators of great democratic expectations. However, in recent years growing concerns have been raised regarding the relevance of network mediated participation. It is argued, for example, that these platforms propitiate the trivialization of complex political issues, the formation of echo chambers, the “disembedding” of communication from “real life”, a resurgence of mass sentimentalist politics, the dependence of publics on the corporate logic underlying the design of social media platforms, and the use of social media as a factor that reduces productivity or efficacy. These issues raise the need to inquire about the extent to which audiences can achieve a "relevant" participation through their opinions in social media networks.

However, the concept of relevance remains an abstract category. In this paper, we describe in detail four perspectives of operationalization that are currently being tested in a survey within a project called "From television audiences to social networks: media convergence in the digital society" (CONVERED), funded by the Ministry of Economy of Spain and executed since 2016 by a team of researchers at San Pablo-CEU University. The objective of this survey is to measure the relevance assigned by social network users to the expression of their own opinions through these platforms. The survey is aimed at a sample of 1200 cases in the municipality of Madrid.

The four perspectives initially emerged from a content analysis applied to a set of ten works on social media selected by EBSCO as fundamental reference literature in this field. This analysis determined that relevance can be understood as productivity (the extent to which different types of costs are reduced in the achievement of objectives), relation to reality (the extent to which the use of social networks is linked to the true identities and relationships of social subjects), meaning (the extent to which the objectives pursued through social networks are framed in a broader scheme of meaning) and values ​​(the extent to which the use of social networks facilitates the promotion of principles such as justice and others). This paper describes these perspectives and their operationalization proposal as used in our project (CONVERED), considering that they can be useful in other research endeavors that face the complex relationship between public opinion and social networks.