Before the emergence of social media, monitoring public perceptions relied primarily on newspaper articles and online news. Nowadays, communications professionals consider it crucial to engage with users and discussions on social media platforms, which accommodates a significant part of the public debate. Public institutions utilize online platforms as a means to communicate directly with citizens, which is particularly vital in times of crisis. Despite equipping their communications departments with media monitoring software, communications professionals still experience a difficulty to act, due to the cacophonic nature of social media. In this article, we report on a Dutch research project named Goed Gere(a)geerd, which studies the digitalization of communication work through discursive psychology, presenting initial practice-informed insights by end-users in relation to the framework of mediatization, datafication, and platformization. We argue that the rise of social media has not necessarily simplified the understanding of public perceptions within the broader public debate, yet has introduced both new opportunities and challenges. In light of these challenges, we propose that it could be beneficial to shift away from at tempts to monitor every citizen’s expression through increasingly expansive data systems, and instead focus on social interactions that carry a higher risk of escalation. To help prevent the escalation of issues online, or even offline, the communications professional could turn to the discursive psychological framework, which focuses on linguistic patterns indicative of a larger social context.
