Science Communication Is Culture: Foregrounding Ritual in the Public Communication of Science

From Linear to Cultural Views of Science Communication

As readers of this journal are well aware, science communication is a diverse field of inquiry that draws from multiple disciplines (Bucchi, 2008; Priest, 2010). Broadly, science communication scholarship falls into three approaches: linear, ahistorical approaches (public understanding of science); dialogic approaches (public engagement with science); and cultural approaches (coconstitution of science and publics). Neat separations and linear progressions between these streams of inquiry do not exist in practice; nevertheless, these classifications are useful heuristics as they offer a focal point for examining the shifting roles that scientists and lay publics are asked to play in relation to one another as well as the models of communication that inform how these social interactions are analyzed, understood, and enacted.

In its most narrow sense, science communication refers to linear forms of communication between those authorized to produce and represent science such as scientific experts and communications professionals and those who consume scientific information such as various lay publics and policy makers. Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver’s (1963) highly influential but overly simplistic information model of communication is an illustrative example. Rooted in a mathematical approach to the transmission of information in physical systems, this model assumes that interpersonal communication proceeds in a similarly linear, decontextual, apolitical, and ahistorical fashion. This communication model was shaped by and in turn helped shape the public understanding of science movement, a science-centered and science-led initiative that emphasizes the educational and, by implication, civilizing role that science plays in society. This traditional—and for many scientists dominant—understanding of the public communication of science is characterized by the following assumptions: Science and the public are separate and only the former influences the latter; communication is a process of information transfer; the media serves as an imperfect and often distorted channel to convey scientific information; and the public is a passive, ignorant, and sometimes hostile recipient of scientific knowledge (Bucchi, 2008, pp. 58-59). These assumptions form what Arie Rip (2006) calls folk theories of public engagement that gain prominence and acceptance not from empirical validation but from being widely rehearsed, repeated, and reinforced by a network of people.

The theoretical turn in the 1990s from questions of public understanding to public engagement shifted the terrain of research and practice. This change was informed by critiques of the linear deficit model and its implicit imaginary of lay publics as empty vessels waiting to be filled with authoritative facts (Callon, 1999; Irwin & Wynne, 1996; Wynne, 1992). In contrast to deficit approaches, engagement models of science communication position lay citizens as active in their handling of scientific information and as sophisticated in negotiating decision making on issues that involve science and technology. These sentiments are reflected in Jane Gregory and Steve Miller’s (1998) definition of science communication as “a process of generating new, mutually acceptable knowledge, attitudes and practices . . . a dynamic exchange, as disparate groups find a way of sharing a single message” (p. 247).

In tandem with engagement models, science communication has also taken up questions of culture in which power, identity, values, and representation are central. The cultural turn in science communication draws on a wide range of intellectual traditions. For some, political communication foregrounds the ways in which agenda setting, framing, and media gatekeeping powerfully shape and constrain the public communication of science (e.g., Scheufele, 2014). For those situated in science and technology studies, public engagement models provide avenues for input from lay publics by positioning science as cultural, a socially conditioned, historically contingent, and value-laden institution that upholds values and assumptions that warrant scrutiny and debate (Wynne, 1993). Traditions of symbolic interactionism in turn illustrate the centrality of performance, narrative, and ritual in the ways in which experts communicate about science in public settings (Hilgartner, 2000; Wynne, 2013) and among each other (Rip, 2006). Combining the British tradition of cultural studies with insights from science and technology studies, Sarah Davies, Maja Horst, and Alan Irwin expand the repertoire of cultural accounts of science communication to include identity formation, informal mundane practices, and the institutional and national production of knowledge, representation, and meaning (Davies, 2011; Davies & Horst, 2016; Horst, Davies, & Irwin, 2016; Horst & Irwin, 2009; Irwin, 2006; see also Broks, 2006; Longnecker, 2016). Situating science communication in international contexts further illustrates the incompatible and at times incommensurate identities, narratives, and values across social groups and geographical regions (Medin & Bang, 2014).

While theoretical approaches to science communication have changed considerably over time, a tacit assumption often remains that the fundamental role of communication is to transmit, exchange, and share ideas, symbols, knowledge, and information albeit through diffuse pathways and myriad interpretive frameworks. By privileging certain aspects of communication, namely, learning, understanding, informing, interpreting, and representing, existing approaches to science communication tacitly exclude some of the dimensions of ritual to which Carey’s analysis invites consideration.

Communication Is Culture: A Ritual View of Communication

What does Carey’s ritual view of communication offer that is missing from existing approaches to science communication? It is important to note from the outset that Carey did not invent the ritual model of communication; rather, he kept an older conversation alive by recovering a somewhat neglected trajectory of American pragmatist philosophy with the intent to critique and propose an alternative to the empirical approaches in the U.S.-based communications departments of his time. Carey’s theoretical orientation drew from a wide range of sources, including the symbolic interactionism of the Chicago school, Durkheim’s perspectives on ritual, Weber’s social theory of modernity, Innis and Mumford’s critical technology studies, and American pragmatist philosophy. Of these various influences, one of the more significant was Dewey’s insight that mundane acts of public conversation are an important lifeblood for democratic engagement because they enable people to live together as active citizens in a vibrant public sphere. Like Dewey, Carey defined public conversation broadly as any discussion that influences public life, including face-to-face encounters, journalistic prose, fiction, poetry, and academic publications.

Carey anchored his ritual view of communication on Dewey’s claim that “society exists not only by [italics added] transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in [italics added] transmission, in communication” (Dewey, 1916/1944, quoted in Carey, 1989, p. 14). According to Carey, the shift in prepositions signals Dewey’s awareness of a tension between contrasting visions of communication in U.S.-based scholarship and practice: as the transmission of information across space and as a ritual constitutive of human associations over time. Carey (1989) argued that the transmission view of communication, based on metaphors of transporting, distributing, sending, receiving, and translating information, has been most dominant, persistent, and influential in communications scholarship. This model and its associated metaphors are inseparable from ways of thinking established during an era of nation building that “use communication and transportation to extend influence, control and power over wider distances and over greater populations” (pp. 42–43). By contrast, a ritual approach positions communication as an act of communing and associating over time, highlighting the “construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world that can serve as a control and container for human action” (Carey, 1989, p. 19).

In formulating his ritual view of communication, Carey (1989) challenged commonsense approaches to language that were prevalent at the time, particularly “the view of language as reference, correspondence and representation and the parallel view that the function of language is primarily to express assertions about the world” (p. 84). Carey objected to attempts to position communication as an object that can be discovered and revealed through a purportedly neutral method of analysis. Emphasizing that social reality is neither pregiven nor external to the unfolding of everyday lived experiences, Carey argued that communication constitutes social worlds. It is from this basis that he maintained that communication is culture. Simultaneously a product of and a container for human interaction, culture is “formed and sustained, repaired and transformed, worshiped and celebrated in the ordinary business of living” (Carey, 1989, p. 87).

Newspapers, for instance, play a fundamental role in democratic life not only by supplying information to and informing audiences but also by nourishing, amplifying, and extending public conversations. In short, newspapers make possible certain cultural practices of engagement while suppressing and marginalizing others. The quotidian act of creating, purchasing, and reading newspapers enrolls and connects various people, including audiences, journalists, editors, paper deliverers, newspaper stand employees, and so forth, in provisional relationships that otherwise would not transpire. In turn, the simple act of reading a newspaper enhances the expectation that citizens can and should keep abreast of recent events, focusing attention on the current moment and less on past events and historical processes. As such, newspapers act in a similar fashion to other technologies of modernity by providing the conditions for norms of transparency, visibility, and contemporaneity to take hold in the public imaginary.

What makes Carey’s ritual view theoretically relevant for contemporary science communication scholarship is the way in which it connects mundane, situated acts of conversation with scaled up efforts to order social worlds. Central to this framework is a recognition of the embodied and material dimensions of communication:

To say that communication begins in ritual is to say it begins in conversation in the sense that it is embodied. Conversation requires the actual presence of bodies. To speak is to . . . enter a social relation activating and displaying all the capacities of the body. . . . The oral and the conversational then displays the body in its full apprehensive range; it utilizes not only sound but also sight, touch, and smell not only the aural but also the visual and gestural. (Carey, 1997, p. 314)

For Carey, communication cannot be reduced solely to symbolic exchange because it also includes the material, emotional, and affective dimensions that shape how meaning is shared and transformed over time and space. In short, culture is not an epiphenomenon of values and norms that shape human behavior but is entangled in and enacted through varied moods, beliefs, desires, and practices through which order is imposed on chaos and uncertainty. Ritual is an embodied form of culture that provides the forms and shape of social relations into which people enter and through which meaning is made, negotiated, contested, and maintained.

In foregrounding ritual, Carey offers a decidedly contingent approach to communication in which space matters. Insistent that culture can be analyzed not in the abstract but from a geographically, historically, and materially situated understanding, Carey argued that attempts to generalize about communication are flawed unless these accounts also address the spatial processes through which “given cultures know, judge, and make their world” (Carey, 1997, p. 311). This account echoes Sheila Jasanoff’s (2004) insistence that science is interpreted through the territorially bounded civic epistemologies that give it meaning. For Carey, spatial processes are not reducible to passive physical containers or environments external to the unfolding of time and culture; rather, spatial processes refer to the interplay among material contexts, technological mediations, social practices, and symbolic acts. Taking the spatial dimensions of communication seriously acknowledges the relational interplay among physical space in the sense of bricks-and-mortar, virtual space in the sense of sharing of meaning and social space in the sense of the assumptions and regulations that dictate who is permitted in physical space and what is considered acceptable practices therein. For instance, the public is a profoundly spatial concept that refers simultaneously to the ways in which citizens come together to make collective decisions, to the visibility of these encounters, and to the physical spaces in which democratic practices unfold (Parkinson, 2012).

By situating theories and methods of communication within the cultures that sustain their maintenance across time and space, Carey (1989) was adamant that a ritual view should encourage scholars to consider “the construction, apprehension, and use of models of communication themselves” (p. 32). As such, a ritual model of communication also foregrounds reflexivity—the capacity to reflect on one’s institutional assumptions and values—as an important outcome of public engagement with issues that involve science and technology (Wynne, 1993).

Conclusion

For those unfamiliar with Carey’s approach to communication, this commentary serves as a brief introduction to his work. For those familiar with Carey’s work, this commentary serves as an invitation to reengage with the ideas he put forth. By positioning communication as a ritualistic activity essential for the formation and maintenance of public life, Carey (1989) argued that we cannot fully understand the transmission of information without also taking into consideration the ways in which communication acts as “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed” (p. 23).

To date, Carey’s ideas have not shaped scholarship in science communication to the same extent as they have with journalism, media, and cultural studies. This leaves science communication bereft of important insights that have long been considered foundational in other academic arenas. Carey’s deceptively simple claim that communication is culture points to its importance as a means by which social worlds are both described and constituted and to the myriad ways in which democratic life is made possible by the intimate relationship between communication and political life. In sum, engaging in conversation with the legacy of humanist approaches that Carey revived, promoted, and transformed can enrich and broaden the cultural dimensions of science communication scholarship. Although the field of science communication tends to frame its theoretical models in terms of public deficits or dialogues, an attendant understanding of communication as transmission and ritual can open the field to alternative conceptual frameworks and intellectual trajectories, aligning science communication more squarely with scholarship in which issues of culture, identity, and materiality are central.