Abstract
The advent of new information technologies and new ways of communicating science through new and social media has, according to some, created a novel utopia in which all scientific information is easily available and accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, as these communication forms mature, the new reality is not turning out to be so joyous, as demonstrated in these three recent books about communicating emerging science issues with online media.
In Nanotechnology and the Public: Risk Perception and Risk Communication, Susanna Hornig Priest aptly demonstrates that risk related to scientific research remains real despite its invisibility (in the case of nanotechnologies or nuclear hazards), although risk itself can be tampered, dissimulated, ignored or forgotten: ‘risk is most often a matter of collective perception and expectation, as well as scientific fact’ (p. 30); therefore, ‘risk perception is a matter of opinion’ (p. 30). Unaware persons could dream of the Internet being the valid source of infinite information and reliable warnings, but Susanna Hornig Priest warns that what can be found easily online or on blogs is too often the inaccurate, partial point of view of the military–industrial complex, biased lobbies or pressure groups, as in the case of the promotion of nuclear power or nanotechnologies: ‘many of these sources represent stakeholders rather than neutral sources’ (p. 170).
Even though it is single authored, Nanotechnology and the Public also includes a dozen of short essays (6–8 page each) by noted scientists related to the circulation of scientific knowledge. Their conclusions raise an accurate warning regarding the incapacity of the mainstream media to properly explain issues and specific risks related to nanotechnologies in the eventual case of a catastrophe: ‘If a threat to public health and safety or the environment from a nanotechnology product were large enough to warrant extensive mass media attention, it probably would not be explained well enough to help readers understand the situation’ (Friedman and Egolf, in Priest, p. 164).
In sum, Susanna Hornig Priest’s third book is clearly a strong contribution to the field of scientific communication, sociology of the environment, ethics and media studies, superior to most writings on these topics because it provides an overall, trans-disciplinary perspective on risk, keeping in mind essential dimensions such as ethics, governance and policies, without overlooking the bare, basic scientific facts. She reminds us that all our leaders’ scientific choices and decisions always give societal directions that have long-term consequences: technologies shape our present and our future. The choices we make today about what kinds of research and development are worthy of investment, how to manage technology’s risks and distribute its benefits, what policies should be put in place to encourage the adoption of particular technologies […] (p. 86)
For its nuanced critique of science, Susanna Hornig Priest’s Nanotechnology and the Public: Risk Perception and Risk Communication is essential for university libraries and public libraries alike.
Brian Southwell’s Social Networks and Popular Understanding of Science and Health: Sharing Disparities has a similar focus on information sharing, peer-to-peer forwarding of news and the circulation of ideas. Southwell demonstrates a disparity between what readers note in the news and what they actually transfer to others via emails or Twitter: ‘the stories that most people read were not all the same as the stories the most people e-mailed to others’ (p. 66). Even though he only focuses on information-sharing behaviours in the Eastern United States, Brian Southwell concludes that new media do not really change the ways people (at least in the United States) generally interact and network with others: ‘hyperbole about a supposed social media revolution is not useful, as changes in communication technology have not eliminated the interpersonal interaction differences that abound […]’ (p. 104). Although he is not quoted here, these core ideas on social diffusion had already been discussed and theorised within the European context by French sociologist Dominique Wolton (1999) in his book Internet et après. Wolton argued that even though technologies of information such as the Internet facilitates and accelerates interactions between persons situated at antipodes, it cannot abolish the cultural distances.
In his book Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere, Damien Smith Pfister brings a Habermasian critique of the pseudo-democratic dimension of the blogosphere through strategies such as the trope ‘flooding the zone’, which implies ‘the capacity of bloggers and other digitally networked intermediaries to invent arguments that shape public deliberation’ (p. 87). Drawing on theoreticians like Michael Keren (2006), the author concentrates on the politics of the blogosphere: ‘blogs may connect individuals to the “public arena” in the same way that salons and coffeehouses did […]’ (p. 114). Among many observations and theoretical insights, Pfister concludes that blogs actually reframe, reinterpret and sometimes simplify facts because ‘citizens are involved in the process of rearranging, or remixing, extant symbol fragments’ (p. 191), adding that ‘a blog “remixes” a news story by linking to it and excerpting a paragraph’ (p. 191). Nevertheless, despite their uneven, sometimes invalidated and often unreliable contents, blogs about science remain influential and become more and more quoted outside the blogosphere, either by students or on radio stations. The abundance of blogs by scientists carrying complex demonstrations and other blogs by non-scientists who are genuinely interested in science without always bringing in the nuance and methodological prudence only adds to this broader issue of validating current scientific discourses.
Some key ideas and core concepts reappear in these three excellent books: first, risk perception being reduced to a matter of public opinion; second, the manipulation of public agendas by relatively few agenda-setters; and third, the framing of public deliberation. Just like communication noise, the unwanted result of these additional intermediaries within the distorted communication chain is the loss of a factual, neutral and overall vision of many scientific issues or, at least, the original source of the message which contains various expressions of concerns and warnings. These errors and misinterpretations are the unwanted portions of what the twenty-first century public understands and remembers about science nowadays. In other words, it would be utopian to hope that new media will soon rectify the current mistakes, misunderstandings and exaggerations already present in ‘old media’. In sum, in this context of a busier circulation of knowledge and cultural traffic, the new social media are neither a remedy nor a panacea; they are just a part of a bigger problem.