Today, there is an emerging interest for the potential role of hermeneutics in reflecting on the practices related to digital technologies and their consequences. Nonetheless, such an interest has not yet given rise to a unitary approach nor to a shared debate. The primary goal of this paper is to map and synthetize the different existing perspectives in order to pave the way for an open discussion on the topic. The article is developed in two steps. In the first section, the authors analyse digital hermeneutics "in theory" by confronting and systematising the existing literature. In particular, they stress three main distinctions among the approaches: 1) between "methodological" and "ontological" digital hermeneutics; 2) between data-and text-oriented digital hermeneutics and 3) between "quantitative" and "qualitative" credos in digital hermeneutics. In the second section, they consider digital hermeneutics "in action", by critically analysing the uses of digital data (notably tweets) for studying a classical object such as the political opinion. In the conclusion, we will pave the way to an ontological turn in digital hermeneutics. Most of this article is devoted to the methodological issue of interpreting with digital machines. The main task of an ontological digital hermeneutics would consist instead in wondering if it is legitimate, and eventually to which extent, to speak of digital technologies, or at least of some of them, as interpretational machines.

In recent years, decision makers have reported difficulties in the use of official statistics in public policy: excessively long publication delays, insufficient coverage of topics of interest, and the top‐down process of data creation. The deluge of data available online represents a potential answer to these problems, with social media data in particular as a possible alternative to traditional data. In this article, we propose a definition of “Soft Data” to indicate data that are freely available on the Internet, and that are not controlled by a public administration but rather by public or private actors. The term Soft Data is not intended to replace those of “Big Data” and “Open Data,” but rather to highlight specific properties and research methods required to convert them into information of interest for decision makers. The analysis is based on a case study of Twitter data for urban policymaking carried out for a European research program aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of European cohesion policy. The article explores methodological issues and the possible impact of “Soft Data” on public policy, reporting on semistructured interviews carried out with nine European policymakers.

Dans cette conversation inédite de 2003, Paul Ricœur reconsidère la pratique psychanalytique, négligée dans son livre De l’interprétation (1965). La cure lui apparaît comme le lieu d’un passage du conflit des forces à un conflit de sens. Ricœur insiste sur l’émergence langagière de l’appel à l’autre du sujet, où se rencontrent le désir, la souffrance et le sens.

This article discusses the value of gift exchange in online social media. In the first part, the authors show how most of the commentators have considered online gifting as an alternative to the classical market economy. Yet the recent (re)territorialization of the web challenges this perspective. As a consequence, the internet can no longer be considered a reply to capitalism. In the second part, the authors argue that in anthropology and social philosophy the term ‘gift’ has often been used improperly, and that gift exchange has nothing to do with goods exchange, but with mutual recognition. In the third part, they use this definition to stress the importance of gift circulation through Facebook’s ‘Like’ button and the Twitter feature called ‘Mention’. In conclusion, the authors deal with the ‘Like economy’, i.e. the interference between gift exchange and market economy which is daily at work online.

The article aims to offer a new theoretical framework for thinking about surveillance and control in social media. In the first section, the authors show how Panopticism found breeding ground in social media studies. Yet they claim that despite an expanding critical literature, not much seems to be changing in prosumers’ practices online. Their hypothesis is that this is happening not only because individuals are forced or cheated by the technical systems, as it has been usually argued, but also because they voluntarily submit to them. For this reason, in the second section, the authors introduce the notion of voluntary servitude, coined by Étienne de la Boétie in the XVIth century. Voluntary servitude is a paradoxical notion because it represents the attempt of tidying up two opposite facts: human beings’ will of freedom and their reiterated submission. In the third section, they make the notion operative in the context of social media by focusing on privacy as the counter-discourse of surveillance. In conclusion, the authors deal with the emancipatory character of voluntary servitude, as well as with the concept of subjectivity it entails.