I have recently entertained a whole series of connected thoughts inspired by the idea of the sentiment ticker. To summarise this is a device that uses keyword analysis to read the emotions of people who write content online. Because there’s so much online it may be possible to gauge the moods and feelings of whole groups, nations or the world. The technique is in its infancy but leading hedge funds already use it to try to predict stock prices, so where the money goes the rest are to follow, perhaps.
Coincidentally at the same time I started listening to an audiobook of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. I soon observed there was a synchronicity. Author’s note: I don’t believe such coincidences are magical or psychic in origin, as Jung thought, but they are still an interesting mental event and even literary tool.
The sentiment ticker and opinion mining in general would definitely qualify as embryonic Asimovian Psychohistorical tools. Governments and organisations could use them for prediction and other research. A way to formalise events in current affairs and link them with observed sentiment trends would be very powerful. If connections could be found then you may have the beginning of actual equations.
The other subject which is connected is the real, as opposed to SF, subject of Psychohistory. This is a discipline that uses psychotherapy techniques to try and understand the motivation of nations, groups and particularly political leaders. It is fascinating and its primary conclusion is that child rearing is critical for the future of the species. This is because psychological damage to children propagates into damaged maladapted adults who act neurotically and create conflict and perpetuation of their damage in the world. The sentiment mining approach could be a very powerful tool for a modern de Mausian psychistorian because huge volumes of textual data could be sifted for emotion words and phrases which correspond to psychohistorical patterns. Incidentally the baroque violence and depraved imagery of newspaper political cartoons are currently one of the richest veins for sentiment mining by psychohistorians, but an image processor would currently be very hard to make that could do this job.
