The disengaged in science communication: How not to count audiences and publics

1. Introduction

Scholars of cultural studies and media studies have long demonstrated that media are immanent to society (e.g. Innis, [1951]2008; McLuhan, [1964]1994; Williams, 1974), that media are various and particular, (e.g. Meyrowitz, 1985) and that audiences are active (e.g. Ang, 1991; De Certeau, 1984; Hall, 1980; Morley, 1980). Rather than asking what media do to audiences, research in these fields focuses on how particular audiences use specific media. By contrast, uninformed media commentary – the kind that blames the media for social ills, for instance – relies on at least three false ‘common sense’ assumptions. First, it maintains a false distinction between media, on one hand, and society, on the other, sometimes referring to ‘media and society’ as though these were distinct. The second false assumption is that media are homogeneous, and that arguments can be made that apply to all news sources, to magazines, to films, to Twitter and so on. The third characterises audiences (readerships, listeners) as those acted upon rather than as actors. Various moral panics have arisen from these false assumptions, such as those about the dangers of novel reading for women, the dangers of comics to children and so on. These panics regard audiences for media (who, by the way, are never coincident with the authors of such comments) as lesser beings in need of education or protection.

Taking a more scholarly approach to these assumptions, cultural and media studies scholars challenge these assumptions: how could one usefully study media outside of society? Or study any part of society without thinking about media – is there, somewhere, an unmediated part of society? In regard to the second assumption, there is very little that can usefully be said that applies to all media (there are few satisfactory ways to finish the sentence ‘media are …’): research must instead be specific rather than general: of a particular programme on a particular medium at a certain time and place, for instance. And third, and most importantly here, as members of audiences themselves, media studies scholars recognise that they use their own experiences and expertise to make meaning with media products – and assume that other audience members must do the same, and that audience members are active in making meaning, using their own experiences and expertise to do so. We will return to what audience research can contribute to the discussion and understanding of publics in science communication by considering various ways we can measure success in mass media. Nevertheless, outside of cultural studies and media studies scholarship, these assumptions – particularly the distinction between media and society – remain, even while our uses of media become increasingly diverse, quotidian and inextricable from our social lives. Discussion during the taxi ride, or at the neighbourhood barbecue, or outside cultural and media studies circles, will often focus on the ways that media either reflect or create society, as if media exist on one side of a divide and society on the other.

Although some STS, scholars recognise that the distinction ‘science and the public’ is problematic (Irwin, 1995; Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Leach and Scoones, 2005; Michael, 1996; Rothman et al., 1996; Varughese, 2012), the use of the distinction survives commonly in science communication. For example, the question: ‘How can science be better communicated with the public?’, for instance, is repeated ad nauseam in policy documents and academic scholarship (Bickford et al., 2012; Manzini, 2003; Nielsen, 2005; Treise and Weigold, 2002; Weigold, 2001). Much like the issue discussed in relation to the media and audiences above, this question places science on one side of a divide, and the public on the other. Science communicators are positioned as mediators. The very existence of Science Communication as a field reifies the divide. Science is understood as being so removed from the public that there is a need for specialised communicators between the two. The distinction ‘science and the public’ is both constitutive and sustaining of the field of science communication. But each term of the distinction remains to a greater or lesser extent unexamined by science communicators.

Beginning with science, even advocates and practitioners have differing views on what science is, or on which practices and philosophies define what it is to ‘do’ science. Shapin has demonstrated that there is no agreement between scientists nor between scientific disciplines, on what constitutes a scientific method, for instance. (2010) And, as Ruth Bleier (1986) argues: ‘… each step in the scientific method is profoundly affected by the values, opinions, biases, beliefs and interests of the scientist’ (p. 3). Although scientists themselves may be aware of the limitations and uncertainties of their practices and disciplines, publicists continue to rely on what Fee calls ‘an authoritarian view of scientific truth’ (Bleier, 1986: 43).

The physical sciences alone include a multitude of institutions, practices, kinds and collections of knowledge and technologies. Is it possible then to say anything useful that applies to ‘science’ as a category? Like ‘the media’, ‘science’ can mean disciplines, technologies, practices, professional categories, programmes, institutions, combinations of these and more, depending on context.

Brian Wynne (2014) argues that there remains ‘a dense confusion of meanings’ given to science that remain unexamined in discussions of science and the public. Sometimes ‘science’ is knowledge about the physical world, as when pundits are outraged that people don’t know particular things that scientists know and think the public should know such as the PEW Research Centre Science Quiz (Monmaney, 2013). Sometimes, it is a set of specific practices - laboratory procedures, field observation or peer review – the ways in which scientists might come to a consensus on certain issues, for instance. Sometimes science means ‘what scientists do’, and sometimes it just means whatever is evidence-based enough to be credible or plausible. This failure to define what is meant by ‘science’ leads to further confusion in discussions of what is meant by ‘the public’ and again when such publics are surveyed and categorised. As Wynne (2014) puts it of the Public Understanding of Science (PUS) field: ‘The PUS field’s neglect of the systematic problematisation of science, when this is an essential element of understanding publics in relation to science […] undermines its capacity to fulfill its central task, of understanding those publics themselves’.

To what sort of entity does ‘the public’ refer then? Is it a group of rational citizens who vote, or a group sparked into being over a particular issue? Is it the Parents and Citizens Association of the local school or members of a dance class? Is it the same as an audience? Is it a random sample of people in a certain country? Is it a group of political activists? Or is it, as the divide ‘science and the public’ suggests, a group constructed solely as ‘not-science’: those in need of education? The distinction ‘science and the public’ categorises that which is not-science as ‘the public’, and vice versa, and thus offers science a special position, not offered to other areas of knowledge and expertise, of being outside (above) the public. In this distinction, history or economics or arts scholars, for example, are part of ‘the public’, and hence understood as being vulnerable to subjective and political concerns that need not trouble science. Physics or chemistry or biology scholars, by contrast, are considered to be a part of ‘science’, and so outside ‘the public’ – science is here outside the political. This position – of not being a part of ‘the public’ – paradoxically gives science a privileged voice in public issues.

Wynne (2014: 61) argues that because a post-World War II presumption that science has sovereignty over public meanings has been projected onto society, science’s role has been extended beyond that of informing policy and public debate into being the de facto author of public meanings and of public concerns. And, according to Wynne (2014), it follows that ‘… if public meanings are or should be naturally science-framed, then how can public dissent from “scientific” assertions … be anything but misunderstanding, or rejection, of science?’ (p. 62). Having constructed ‘the public’ as not-science, one can claim sovereignty for science over public meanings and allow science a normative power. Those who challenge scientific sovereignty over public meanings (note that these people need not challenge scientific findings themselves, or science as science) are first categorised and then targeted for conversion. ‘Science and the public’ is first used to distinguish science from the public and is then mobilised by one sphere (science–as-author-of-public meanings) to appropriate the other sphere (the public).

From the special position accorded to science, science communicators can study the public. Members of the (not-science) public are surveyed as to their scientific knowledge or their interest in science. Those who display either a lack of knowledge or interest are categorised as a problem (Barnett et al., 2007). This, then helpfully demonstrates how necessary science communicators are and gives science communicators further licence to study the public. ‘The public’ is divided into categories for study, with the stated aim of converting the public to science (a conversion endlessly deferred by the framing: ‘science and the public’). In particular, the category of ‘the disengaged’ is the focus of intense interrogation: how can communicators capture the interest of these people who prefer not to engage? The double move of ‘science and the public’ outlined above allows the category of the disengaged to be constructed and then targeted for (an always deferred) conversion.

2. The disengaged

Science communication is inherently linked to notions of the public. In science communication, the ‘public’ is usually understood as pre-existent, an entity waiting to be studied. This ‘public’ is then dissected and categorised for analytic purposes. An exemplary way of dissecting the public (though not the only one by any means) is large-scale surveys, such as the ‘Special Eurobarometer Science and Technology Report’ which categorises the public into those ‘very interested in’, ‘moderately interested in’, ‘not at all interested in’ science, and those who ‘do not know’ (European Commission, 2010). Based on this dissection, the researchers construct various publics, which are granted ontological status. Those expressing great or moderate interest in science become ‘the engaged’, while those expressing a lack of interest become ‘the disengaged’ (Ashworth et al., 2011). Those who answer ‘do not know’ and its equivalents in other surveys are often categorised as disengaged with science, though our primary interest in this article is with those expressing a lack of interest: ‘the disengaged’.

The disengaged is a broadly constructed public that has received special attention and one that has long been of interest in science communication (Barnett et al., 2007; Bauer et al., 2007; Mikulak, 2011). Cormick and Romanach (2014), for example, express this interest in a recent article, stating that ‘Of particular interest from this study was that 30% of the population were unengaged from or disinterested in science and technology issues’. The challenge for much of science communication is what to do with such apparent disengagement. If science communicators are to work with this category of the disengaged as though it is a group of actual people, should they approach this disengagement with detached interest – in an almost anthropological way – or should science communication be interested in the disengaged in a more instrumental way – so as to be able to engage them? These questions are also closely linked with perspectives and agendas in science communication, from the PUS agenda that focuses largely on one-way, top-down communication, to the public engagement with science (PES) agenda that endorses two-way, dialogic forms of communication.

Indeed, as long as the science/public divide is reified by the existence of science communicators to bridge that divide the shift from PUS to PES is largely rhetorical because ‘science’ maintains its privileged status and its sovereignty over public meanings, despite the claims of a shift in approach. Even PES understands engagement as ‘two-way’, that is, science⇔public, rather than allowing for multiple and competing contributions to particular issues (farmers, artists, politicians, mothers, educators, poets, historians, hydrologists, arborists, engineers and physicists). Only if ‘science’ is understood as a homogenous singular activity can the engagement between ‘science’ and ‘the public’ be a two-way exchange – usually, though not necessarily one in which science is granted an overarching authority to pose and to answer public questions.

For now, let’s follow the rhetoric, and its effects on the category of the disengaged. Under the PUS perspective, the disengaged are a challenge because much of the field is dominated by the view that ‘in a society as dominated as ours by the attitudes and the products of science and technology, it is important and desirable – even essential – that the general public be informed at length and in depth about science and technology’ (Leon, 1981). One of the reasons put forward for the importance of the public being informed is a democratic argument that ‘the public is often asked to make decisions about technologies’ and that ‘few politicians or financial experts have any scientific training’, so the community must be given the knowledge in order for it to exercise its democratic right (Stocklmayer et al., 2002). In this characterisation, by not being interested in science, the disengaged are a dual failure: first, they failed in their civic duties of being capable of understanding the goings-on of our societies, and, second, they reflect a failure on the part of the system to ensure that members of the general public are well-informed about science and technology. This is understood as not only a problem for democratic participation; it also leads to concerns over social justice.

Indeed, science communicators should care about the disengaged because failure to address the engaged/disengaged divide will only lead to it widening as the ‘information-rich science enthusiasts become even more informed while the broader American audience remains disengaged’ (Nisbet and Mooney, 2009). But this is an argument for general education, rather than only for science education. Voters need to make economic and legal decisions too, so the same case can be made for legal or economic education. Here, the science⇔public distinction works extra hard. The public is given its political agency with one hand, and then has it taken away with the other. Its political agency only counts when the public supports the political position that has been presented as if it is science; those that express a different view are excoriated as being anti-science – which is then conflated with being anti-democratic. This move first mythologises science as apolitical (outside ‘the public’), then, derives normative claims based on science, which are collapsed into its remit, giving science the ultimate voice on public issues. The public is then called upon to accept the normative claims that have been attached to science. If the public does not accept these claims (the normative ones), then it is regarded as both anti-science and an affront to democracy.

To rephrase, because they do not identify as being ‘engaged with science’ (which they have been taught includes its attached normative statements), the disengaged are accused of not being public (political) enough. But should they engage in political actions that are understood as ‘anti-science’ (i.e. that don’t follow the normative aspects attached to science), then they will be excoriated for those too. Only agreeing with or deferring to (the normative claims of) science as the primary knowledge to be used for making public decisions is acceptable. The disengaged are to be encouraged to engage but only on the (political and normative) terms specified by the scientist/science communicator who is claiming, in part, that science has a special status because it is apolitical. Members of the public can engage with science, but only on science’s political terms. And even then, their position as ‘public’ will always be defined by the relationship with ‘science’. Yet the disengaged play a key role in the way science communication is framed and pursued. Under the PUS agenda, knowing about and understanding the disengaged so as to be able to engage them becomes a political imperative that cuts across issues of both democratic capacity and social justice. There is an underlying assumption in the PUS model that the audience/ public/ reader of the science communication is passive, that she or he accepts the message as it was sent. PES critiques of this model as it is enacted in policy, by retaining the science⇔public distinction, also retain this idea of passivity, even while suggesting that a different formulation of the message – one that engages the recipient more and that allows or welcomes reciprocal contributions – will be an improvement.

As the focus in science communication has shifted away from concerns over understanding of science and towards engagement with science, the interest in those ‘captured’ within the category of the disengaged has likewise been revised, though it remains one of the main concerns of the discipline. Rather than being primarily concerned with how to convert the disengaged and the disinterested to the cause of science, as was the political imperative of the PUS agenda, the disengaged are now a group to be studied because of the special form of interaction they bring about. This interest in the disengaged as objects to be studied varies from concerns over the social reason for their disengagement to interest in the effect and implications of that disinterest. Van der Sanden and Meijman (2008), for example, argue that the disinterested demand further consideration so as to assess the social and cultural causes of their disinterest, thus permitting us to enter into a dialogue with them and allowing us to remedy this disinterest, if we so desired. By contrast, Horst and Michael (2011) view the disinterested as a useful challenge to our habitual conceptions of the world because the disengaged force us to ‘rethink communication itself (and investigate what communication means in such an event and how the audience, including the uninterested, shape the communicator)’. Indeed, the interest in engagement and the disengaged is one of the dominant running themes in science communication, as can be seen by the role this category plays in national initiatives for science in society (Department of Innovation Industry Science and Research, 2010; Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2014).

3. The disengaged in policy

Many national initiatives are based on the premise that the larger the proportion of the population that is engaged with the sciences the better (McCallie et al, 2009; Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2014). Exactly what engagement means or what shape such engagement should take may be less well-defined, but the aim of ‘engagement’ is often clearly stated. Australia’s national science engagement initiative, Inspiring Australia, aims to create ‘A society that critically engages with key scientific issues’ (Department of Innovation Industry Science and Research, 2010), and in its first pages, states as a concern that ‘Many Australians are yet to engage with the sciences’. Likewise, the recent New Zealand science in society strategy, ‘A Nation of Curious Minds’ states that one of its concerns stems from the fact that ‘half did not recognise the relevance of science in their daily lives (44 per cent) or were disengaged from science (9 per cent)’ (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2014). As a result, the initiative has a mandate to ‘encourage and enable better engagement with science and technology across all sectors of New Zealand society’ (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, 2014).

The construction of the disengaged as a category, while possibly politically useful, is deeply problematic. The group of individuals represented in this category is likely to display a far less cohesive set of attitudes than is presented in such national initiatives or indeed in many research papers (Horst and Michael, 2011). Strategies that aim to address the people within the category are, for that reason alone, unlikely to succeed. The belief that such a group can be targeted for science education relies on the assumptions that there is a meaningful distinction to be made between science and the public; that each of those terms is stable and agreed, that what is included in ‘science’ or ‘science and technology’ is also agreed among respondents and questioners; and – most of all – that those who are categorised (as the disengaged in this case) are passive in making meaning.

4. The disengaged as politics

The core question to consider here is what does it mean to be disengaged? Since the beginning of attitudinal surveys in science communication onwards, the disengaged have been conceived of by science communicators as the group that expresses no interest in science and technology, ‘the residual public’, to use Miller’s term (Miller, 1992). It is rare at best to ask respondents how they understand the relevant questions or what they understand by phrases such as ‘science and technology’. There could be any number of reasons why individuals may choose not to express an interest with regard to a topic, and it is naïve to think that a choice not to express a view or an interest is the same as not having a view or interest.

A useful place to start thinking about the various motivations individuals have not to express an interest in a given topic is the voting process, and in particular, blank or spoiled votes. Like a failure to express interest in science, spoiled ballots are often assumed to represent ‘the incompetence of a part of the electorate and, hence, lacks interest from a political perspective’ (Uggla, 2008). But this flies in the face of both common sense and research findings, which suggest that, at least at times, invalid votes ‘are a way of trying to send a message, to protest against a political offer that does not fit’ (Zulfikarpasic, 2001). Indeed, Uggla’s (2008) systematic review of invalid ballots from more than 200 elections around the globe suggests that invalid ballots ‘should be seen as the results of a conscious political calculation rather than an unfortunate residual electoral category entirely dependent on the level of education or similar factors’. Indeed, it would be foolish to assume invalid votes represent a uniform and cohesive set of views. Invalid votes stem from a number of motivations ranging from discontent to disinterest, and/or from feelings ranging from alienation to confusion (Damore et al., 2012). We suggest something similar may be true of the attitudes hinted at in the disengaged category. If science communicators assumed that those who identify themselves as disengaged or uninterested in science do so for varying reasons, they may have a better grasp of the kinds of communication, engagement or education that is desired by people grouped in the category. One can only claim to be promoting ‘engagement’, if all parties have some say in the rules of engagement.

5. The disengaged, the idiot and the counterpublic

Expressions of non-engagement are interpreted by science communicators as ‘failures’ to engage. But, from the perspective of the respondent, they may be ways of sending a message, ways of protesting their inclusion in categories with which they do not identify. As with invalid votes, there are many reasons that an individual might express a lack of interest in engaging with science and technology. Let’s speculate on what some of them might be by considering three characterisations that we’ll term the disengaged, the idiot and the counterpublic.

To begin with, there may be a discord in what is understood by ‘science and technology’. Some individuals may simply have no interest in science and technology per se, much like many have no interest in role-playing games, in academic studies of the Arts, in car mechanics or in macramé; let’s call them the disengaged. Such individuals, if asked about their attitudes to science, might well express a lack of interest, but they may be interested in ‘nature’, or ‘facts about the world’, or ‘truth’, or ‘how to fix my broadband’, for instance. What their disengagement expresses is a disinterest in the category ‘science and technology’ as presented in the survey; they are not interested in the brand ‘science and technology’, or in what Wynne (2104) has described as ‘unbounded normative commitments presented as innocent science’. Others might identify themselves with an area other than science – an artist, a historian, a musician, or even any humanities scholar may feel themselves excluded from science and may read the question as one of competing priorities for resources: ‘Are you interested in engaging with science and technology?’, (‘no, I am interested in the Arts, and the Arts deserves more attention/funding’). Disengagement might be an active choice or a political statement. At a stretch, even a hydrologist might see herself as being interested/engaged in hydrology rather than ‘science and technology’ (‘no, I am interested in hydrology …’).

Expressions of disinterest are as likely to represent attitudes towards, and (dis)interest in the nebulous brand ‘science and technology’, and in the political power that it brandishes. Would a fisherman consider his reading about the habitat of rainbow trout in a fishing magazine as an interest in ecology? If he did, would he consider that interest in ecology to be an interest in ‘science and technology’? The fisherman may consider the question: ‘Are you interested in science and technology?’ as inadequate or may mistrust the motives of the questioner.

Others who express a lack of interest may do so for ludic reasons, not everyone likes to play by the prescribed rules, and some people may participate in a science engagement activity or in a survey of attitude to science as a playful object. Such individuals have been termed idiots by Horst and Michael, not in the sense of being mentally weak, but by using philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ model of the idiot (Horst and Michael, 2011; Stengers, 2005). Stengers’ work in turn relies on the Deleuzian interpretation of Melville’s character of Bartleby, he who would ‘prefer not to’ (Melville, 2007). According to Deleuze (1997), Bartleby is disconcerting not because he is resistant, but because he is indeterminate. It is impossible to know or understand his motives or even if he has any. Following from Stengers’ (2005) work, Horst and Michael (2011) argue that the idiot runs against our expectations of how individuals ought to behave and what they ought to be interested in. The idiot refuses to be categorised in the ways that are determined by others: she would ‘prefer not to’. The idiot is especially troubling for the science communicator because she or he highlights the possibility of something outside the categories afforded by the science⇔public duality. There is also the possibility that idiots may be completely engaged and interested in science, but simply not in the way science communicators want them to be. They may even engage ‘idiotically’ because of their views on science: for example, they might view the survey instrument as not scientific enough. And again, they may have insight into their own motivations for troubling the practices that categorise them. They may be active in making meaning even when completing the survey.

A third set of respondents claiming disinterest in science – we might call ‘counterpublics’ – are those who have reasons not to trust the officially recognised scientific worldview. A number of Wynne’s (1992) Cumbrian Sheep farmers are such individuals (Hess, 2011). Members of the public may choose not to express an interest in science because they distrust the institutions that (re)present such science at an event or the institutions that carry out the surveys – consider Australia’s CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) survey ‘Communication and climate change: what the Australian public thinks’ (Ashworth et al., 2011). Individuals expressing a lack of interest in science when responding to such surveys might well do so because they are engaged in a specific issue and through that engagement have come to distrust the official scientific institutions and bodies, much like some voters feel alienated and distrustful of the political parties because they care about politics. Among those categorised as disengaged, there are individuals who don’t engage as the system might wish them to, not because they are not interested, nor because they are wilfully indeterminate, but because they don’t wish to interact with the institutions that are carrying out the engagement, or they disagree with the terms on which that engagement is to be conducted. This group may also understand the issues as being other or broader than science – as fundamentally political issues, for example.

While these three groups – the disengaged, the idiot and counterpublics – do not capture the disparate views of all of those choosing to express a lack of interest in science, they are sufficiently distinct to make clear the problem that this constructed category creates. If our aim is to be descriptive of the world around us, then the category of the disengaged fails to map onto anything that actually exists or at least exists with any uniformity outside the instrument set up to study it. The category of the disengaged seems to apply to two categories. First, it is used to describe an overarching construction for anyone who ‘misbehaves’ by not showing appropriate interest in science. Second, the disengaged is subcategory of this overarching construction (alongside the subcategories of ‘the idiot’ and ‘the counterpublics’) that applies to those who misbehave by not caring about science when the social norm is to care.

If, on the other hand, our aim is to create a category for political purposes, say because we want to find a way to engage them, then the disparity within this overarching category means we are unlikely to succeed. Most importantly, the category fails to acknowledge the agency of those that it categorises. Instead of regarding those who are members of ‘the public’ as dynamic agents, the practice assumes that the public is static and passive, hence preventing engagement in any real sense. Furthermore, despite its claims of producing good citizens, this science communication strategy of categorising people as disengaged seems to do little more than to reproduce the science⇔public distinction.

6. Reinterpreting engagement: Reach and ratings

So surveys construct categories of people, or ‘publics’ depending on their purposes: usually to identify those publics as non-science. Audience research similarly creates audiences according to what it wants to produce.

The various ways we could measure success in mass media, in particular, broadcast programmes in the analogue age, provides us with a useful example. The reason that audiences were measured (to sell audiences to advertisers or to measure whether a public service broadcaster is performing) determined what kind of measurement was made, and what audience was constructed. One way of measuring created a heterogeneous mass audience and the other created serial audiences over time.

In ratings, the goal was to count how many people watched or listened to programmes in peak viewing time (much like attitudinal surveys such as the Eurobarometer do for science), in order to sell that number to advertisers (Heinderyckx, 2006; Balnaves et al, 2011). The larger the number, the more money the advertiser would pay. The ratings system produces a mass audience (sometimes characterised as ‘the lowest common denominator’) to sell to advertisers, and in the process produces populist programming.

If, however, the goal was also to inform, entertain and educate all members of the nation over the course of a week-long schedule (we are relying on the days of mass free-to-air broadcast for our example), another measure – that of ‘reach’ could be used as well (Heinderyckx, 2006; Balnaves et al, 2011). ‘Reach’ (otherwise known as ‘coverage measure’) was more likely to be used by public service broadcasters such as the Australian SBS or ABC, or the British BBC, than it was by commercial broadcasters. What mattered to SBS radio, for example (SBS is a public broadcaster in Australia that broadcasts in 74 languages), was not only how many people listened to the Spanish programme or the Danish programme, but also whether the network reached as many language groups as possible during each week. Similarly, science offers some important ways of making things public, and it is not necessary for all people all the time to have their eye on the ways in which sciences are developing. They may have particular interests in fishing, or gardening, or sheep farming, but not know about gravity waves.

As well as producing different audiences (‘the lowest common denominator’ versus ‘the serial niche audience’), these two ways of measuring audiences produce different ways of thinking about the people who are not listening or watching. Ratings would see the low numbers of the Danish programme as a problem to be addressed, perhaps by broadcasting the Danish programme in English, or perhaps by teaching more people Danish so that they could listen, so that a higher number could be sold to advertisers. Using ‘reach’ as a measure, however, it is not a problem that people who do not speak Danish do not listen to the Danish programme, or in the case of the BBC if not everyone watches or listens to Sherlock or the Edinburgh Military Tattoo or Russell Howard’s Good News or Essential Classics or Prayer for the Day or BBC radio 5’s live coverage of Hull versus Arsenal (respectively, a murder mystery drama, an annual variety special, a comedy programme, a classical music radio show, a spiritual segment on BBC 4 and a Premier League game, all of which are broadcast on the BBC).

Respondents need not support public service broadcasting in general, or even SBS radio in general, in order for the SBS to consider itself successful in a given week. What does matter is that the broadcasters offer something for each of its constituents over a given period (say, for each Australian in the case of the ABC or the SBS). From the law programme to classical music concerts, from Triple J (a youth radio station) to David Attenborough, there is something for nearly everyone, just not necessarily for the whole nation at once. This is a public service. Those who are not listening or watching at any given time need not be pursued, they are not considered as lost audiences nor as being disengaged. There is no need to broadcast the Danish programme in English nor to go out and teach more people to speak Danish. Reach is one measure of how well the public service broadcasters fulfil their charters – which ask them to do much more than to sell audiences to advertisers.

This idea of ‘reach’ assumes that multiple audiences are ‘sparked into being’ (Marres, 2005) around specific languages, issues or programmes rather than assuming for the purposes of study that there is a pre-existing single nation of consumers who must all be engaged at once. Nor are the multiple audiences mutually exclusive. An individual can belong to one or many, (the Danish programme on SBS and Miss Marple; or Triple J and Attenborough). Individuals will also have differing levels and kinds of engagement with different programmes at different times; a matter of great importance when we study audiences for non-instrumental reasons. These ways of understanding audiences seem useful for thinking about some aspects of publics for science, and the ways that we study them. We are not advocating another measuring or survey tool nor are we pushing for a finer segmentation of the public, rather, we are suggesting another way of conceiving of engagement, audiences and publics that does not condescend to those who see themselves as ‘disengaged’ with science. Although audiences are not quite publics, Michael Warner’s (2005) description of publics as ‘discursive spaces that are ceaselessly under construction’ resonates loudly enough with the ideas of active audiences measured by reach for it to be useful here.

Last, if the impetus for creating the disengaged category is one of bolstering advocacy for science, not least to access public funds, then the disengaged category doesn’t tell us much either. To take the analogy of audiences and publics further, many people who don’t regularly use public institutions such as the ABC, the BBC or the SBS, or public libraries, or museums, nonetheless support their existence (Newspoll, 2014; State Library of Queensland, 2012). Those who do not go to Science Centres or Natural History Museums are often still glad that they exist and are often happy to support them with public funds. Similarly, an individual may not feel the need to be up to date in cutting edge science, but still be very happy that public funds are used to support scientists who are, in their specialist fields. So how should we conceive of such people? And why categorise them at all?

7. Conclusion

For many people, outside of general curiosity, science is usually only visible when it is a part of a broader or more personal concern. If children get sick, we look for medical science online or go to a general practitioner (GP); if people are dumping in the Great Barrier Reef, we listen to activists, and to what the specialist scientists have to say, and take political action and so on. Even in these examples, we tend to trust scientific experts rather than studying the science ourselves. Most people, even academics and science academics, don’t have the expertise to read all scientific journals well, and it would not be possible to live day to day if we had to learn all the necessary physics before driving over a bridge or if we had to understand hydrology when we were caught in a flood. A member of the public who identifies her expertise as being in the humanities, fishing or stamp collecting might regard herself as disengaged from science because her expertise lies elsewhere, and because she is aware that scientists are also experts in specific fields. This is not to say, however, that they aren’t interested in the scientific content relevant to their fishing, to their stamp collecting or to their interest in the humanities. It’s simply that it is not science per se that interests them nor do they conceive of such interest as being an interest in science.

Groups of individuals are not audiences or publics at all, much less publics for science, unless and until they are counted, imagined or analysed as such for the purposes of selling advertising (or selling brand ‘science’). How we imagine groups of individuals, and how we categorise and count them, and construct them as ‘audiences’ or ‘publics’, matters.

We argue that we should reconsider our ontology of publics and the disengaged for science. Science communication practice and literature is rarely clear about what is meant by the term ‘science’ (knowledge? nature? machines? a set of professional practices? specific institutions?). Surveys, in particular, produce categories of people by assuming that all respondents share the researcher’s understanding of this term ‘science’, when respondents may have views that diverge significantly. The outcome of such surveys is the repeated finding that many non-scientists are not as interested in science as scientists or science communicators are. This should not be surprising nor should it necessarily be a cause for concern or for further surveys. Imagine if literary scholars (or broadcasters, or artists) regarded those without literary engagement in the same condescending way.

Rather than thinking about publics and the disengaged for science as ontological categories, it may be more useful to try to understand the ways that expert knowledge such as science can be appropriated into, or effective in, the lives and interactions of individuals and in their practices, and the ways that other kinds of expertise and practices might be valuable for science and science communicators. Instead of using surveys to analyse and create artificial audience categories such as the disengaged (thereby, following some kinds of ‘rating’ approach to brand ‘science’), scientists and science communicators could take a ‘reach’ approach to thinking about audiences. Using a ‘reach’ approach would ask us to look at how audiences come into contact with various aspects of science, to see the breadth of such contact and to consider what meaning is made by the audience as they interact with the content. Science, in this context, will often not be explicitly visible as brand ‘science’, instead it might be science as interacted with when looking at medical information online or reading about the Great Barrier Reef in a tourist brochure. Such a perspective would allow us more richly to conceive of what engagement might mean. It would also demand an acknowledgement of the dynamic and complex agency of individuals and groups in specific social and political situations.