Understanding the public temper through an evaluation of rumours: an ethnographical method using educational...

Area of Science:

• Sociology
• Cultural Anthropology
• Communication Studies

Background:

• Rumors are broadly exchanged, shaping a collective 'public temper'.
• Understanding this public temper is crucial for analyzing societal emotional landscapes.
• Existing methods for gauging public temper may not fully capture the nuances reflected in informal communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To explore the possibility of analyzing scholarly rumors as indicators of a society's public temper.
• To examine the public temper of Saudi Arabian society through its online rumors.
• To propose a theoretical framework for understanding rumors as reflections of cultural emotions.

Main Methods:

• Ethnographic analysis of 579 Arabic online rumors.
• Data collected by students engaging with educational technology.
• Categorization of rumors into concerns, interests, attitudes, and values.

Main Results:

• Four emergent categories: concerns, interests, attitudes, and values of Saudi Arabian society.
• These categories collectively represent the emotional domain, or public temper.
• Rumors mirror the public temper, reflecting a spectrum of emotions from simple to complex.

Conclusions:

• Rumors serve as 'biographies' of public tempers, offering insights across time and space.
• Societies can be understood through seemingly ill-defined information found in rumors.
• This study provides ethnographers with a novel method for analyzing public tempers via rumors.