blogging, museum and knowledge politics, science communication studies
Science blogs, singularities and the multitude of technoscience
(In two earlier posts I discussed science communication as a field of governance (here) and the multitude of technoscience (here). Here’s the third post — about the blogging phenomenon and science communication)
Blog-savvy readers of this post hardly need to be reminded about the fact that the blog medium has grown explosively over the last ten years and is now rapidly transforming the global media ecology; in early February 2008, Technorati reported they were tracking 113 million blogs and that the number of daily posts was around 1,6 million.
The majority of these millions of blogs are pretty inactive and the majority of these in turn deal with everything but technoscience. Yet, in absolute numbers, blogs dealing with science, technology and medicine have an impressive presence on the internet.
The number of blogs dealing with science is probably somewhere between the ~28,000 blogs tagged ‘science’ on Technorati and the 1,000 or so ’serious’ blogs that are written by, as Bora Zivkovic puts it ”graduate students, postdocs and young faculty, a few by undergraduates and tenured faculty, several by science teachers, and just a few by professional journalists that deal with pressing issues or aim to engage other scientists in discussions about science practice, scientific publications or science policy”.
The number of blogs tagged ‘medicine’ is almost 6.700 (around 700 of these are ‘serious’) and the number of ‘technology’ blogs (mostly about computers and IT) is over 65,000 (all figures from 9 February 2008).
Number exercises aside, the rapid rise of blogging in these fields is important for understanding science communication today. “Because of their freewheeling nature, these blogs take scientific communication to a different level”, Laura Bonetta (’Scientists enter the blogosphere’, Cell, 129: 443-45, 2007) points out. In my opinion, this “different level” has to do with the fact that blogging is currently more about communicatio than lectio (cf. my earlier post).
Not only is the blog medium easy to use, it also invites people to get their own voice in the global network; furthermore the functionalities of hyperlinking and comments emphasise the social nature of knowledge production and opinion making:
To define blogs as mere “personal diaries on the web” would certainly be miserly … This phenomenon should not be understood as yet another manifestation of an individualism nurtured by society in decay, but is on the contrary the result of a new technological articulation, made transparent by syndication, and taking place in between “intimateness” and “ex-timacy” – to borrow a concept of Laurence Allard. The ”blogosphere” represents not simply the juxtaposition of intimate diaries, but is a true media space which enables subjectivities to exist on a territory of their own, while at the same time “weaving threads” among each other, and which makes it possible for them to assemble around a political and aesthetic subjectivity that is at once their own and shared. It is never “me” who decides whether someone is going to “syndicate” with me. It is always for the other party to decide, and vice-versa (Olivier Blondeau, ‘Hacktivism Street protests, politics, and mobility: A study of activist uses of syndication’; originally published in Multitudes 21 (2005); read it here)
In my ‘multitudinarian’ interpretation, blogs can be seen as ’singularities’ in the sense of Hardt and Negri: there are few group blogs, and even fewer corporate, organisational or national blogs. The large majority of blogs don’t represent any movements, parties, institutions or organisations; instead they function, in a Deleuzian sense, as ”an escape from the dominant codes and majoritarian categories—including those of ‘identity politics’—that otherwise trap the singular in passive or static relations” (Simon Tormey, ‘‘Not in my Name’: Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation’, Parliamentary Affairs 59: 138–154, 206).
Yet blogs are not individualistic in a traditional way: many bloggers identify themselves by pseudonyms. Nor are they solipsistic: there is a high degree of cross-linking between blogs. The net of hyperlinks to other singularities stands for the network of all singularities.
The current dominant mode of thinking among bloggers is one of criticism and resistance. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Technoscience is not homogenous; in fact, the notion of an alleged ‘(techno)scientific community’ conceals the distribution of power and authority within technoscience. Younger scientists complain about their situation as a transnational ‘scientific proletariat’ who live on temporary soft money and have to move around world to get jobs. Even tenured faculty and other people with secure positions are judged largely by the amount of grant money they bring in and how many graduate students they can support. Competition for grants and publications is fierce, and the tactics used to secure them can be ugly, especially in high-profile sciences.
At the moment, as an open network of singularities, the blogosphere has a bias towards the ‘multitude’. But the blogosphere is a contested arena. More and more institutional (both national and transnational) blogs are entering the arena. There are also blogs that are run by organisations which are themselves divided between ‘Empire’ and ‘multitude’ (to continue to use Hardt and Negri’s sometimes contested binary categories; for a foucauldian critique, see here), for example, Nature.com blogs. It is an open question how biopower and biopolitical production will be distributed within the science communicating blogosphere.
(The commentator at the workshop ‘Science Communication as the Co-Production of Sciences and Their Publics’ last Friday, Sebastian Linke from the Section of STS at the University of Gothenburg, will has put his remarks to the whole paper (the last three posts) as a comment to this post)
12 Feb 2008 Thomas
Here are some of my (very preliminary) notes from a reply to Thomas Söderqvists paper “Science Communication, Blogging, and the Multitude of Technoscience”, presented last Friday in Stockholm.
Contrary to the (original) title, the paper that Thomas presents appears not to be about the Blogging phenomenon as such, but rather about everything else and thus makes the task of critiquing both ambiguous as well as a bit unclear. However here I will nevertheless try to highlight what appear to me as the main points from Thomas paper and briefly add some of my concerns, quite broadly formulated.
Thomas expresses a “scepticism” towards everything that has to do with science communication including science communications studies. His critique clearly addresses a crucial tension that has ever been with the subject, or even a paradox: Most science communication is literally not about ‘communicating’ (sharing knowledge, participate), as Thomas notes, but about ‘lectio’ – lecturing and reading science (from ‘above’) through the historically established and institutionalized channels in society to a public, which is in turn only conceptualized and constructed by the existing representations of power in our ‘democracies’. Thomas is in that sense very right to depict and implicitly criticise the (mass) media for aligning with existing power representations thus supporting the hierarchy of science in society; as he puts it “The aims include gathering the populace around the institution of science” (p. 1).
Thomas further on describes and theorises the field of professionalisation that the “communication” of science brought along throughout the 20th century – the space where different sorts of practitioners (lecturers, popularisers, communicators) established the territory that Ulrike Felt has described as the ”hybrid spaces between science and the public”, where alternative forms of knowledge and modes of explanation get presented that orient increasingly towards a non-scientific audience. This “protoprofessionalisation” has, as Felt notes, moved the science boundary and in turn posed new challenges towards politics (Felt 2002: 62/63).
Thomas moves on by taking us on a rather far-reaching excursion into theories of society and – due to the brevity of the presentation – only touches upon the globalisation theories of the ‘Empire’ vs. the ‘Multiutde’ from Michael Hardt and Antoni Negri (although he notes that all his conclusions might collapse by reading Paulo Virno’s “Grammar of the Multitude” – insiders might agree…).
Science Communication, as Thomas states, has become integrated into and mainly follows the logics of the Empire (the representations of power), while the phenomenon of Blogging, that suddenly enters very late in his paper, can be subsumed under the contrasting concept of a “resisting multitude” (Jasanoff) – a culture of criticism and resistance towards the established institutions of power in society. By this feature, I do of course agree with Thomas, that the whole Blogging phenomenon and its adjacent culture are central to the topic of our workshop (Science Communication as the Co-production of Sciences and Their Publics). It entails a new kind of understanding media as a bottom-up mode that allows ‘communicatio’ in a literal sense as opposed to the lecturing practices and the whole “didactic enterprise” mentioned above. However, Thomas could and should have started his explanations here by really investigating the novel features of Blogging for the questions and concerns (scepticism) that he raises. But he does not, unfortunately. The important questions are not touched upon, in which ways does Blogging provide a new techno-social practice that might open a new mode of communication and a forum for real debate, discussion and finally for real dialogue? And why do people blog at all (Nardi et al. 2004)? What are for example the incentives and motivations for scientists to engage in this outreach activity? And what do they finally gain (expect to gain) from communicating with a real public in the virtual world?
Except from this absent topic in the paper (the initial title!), Thomas has my total agreement regarding his general critique about science communication in our societies. But I can’t leave without some concerns. Thomas, in my view, defines science communication far too broadly as a “field of governance”. I have the feeling that he even constructs it as a kind of straw man or target for his far-reaching ultimate criticism of society. That’s neither new nor helpful. To blame all the efforts undertaken in the last decades on engaging and involving people with science as well as all the research about such attempts as “having largely failed” is not fair and does not do any progress to our field, without elaboration on any details or giving further explications on the concepts that he poses as well as on the practices that he criticizes (e.g. what exactly does he mean with the latter ones?).
In this way I am tempted to rephrase his notion into sorry Thomas Söderqvist: your framing of the problem is far too under-complex. We have to have a closer look on the phenomenon and the cases in question in order to move forward and make visible the ways in which knowledge is moving in society (or not, due to various kinds of barriers). Case studies like the ones from Brian Wynne and many others have made substantial contributions in this respect.
I got the overall impression that Thomas puts all what he sees worthwhile critiquing into one big pot, then labels it “science communication” and from there he starts to argue and poses his critique/”scepticism” against it – as a didactic enterprise (‘lecturing’), being institutionalistic, used by existing power representations to secure the hierarchy of science or short “aligning with the Empire”. To problematise such conceptualisations of science communication is both important as well as an illustrative endeavour of critique. But I still ask myself what’s really new in it? Many of the critique that Thomas raises has been taken up many times before in the recapitulating discussions of the ‘deficit-model’ approach, e.g. by an influential early article from Steven Hilgartner “The Dominant View of Popularisation – Conceptual Problems, Political Uses” in 1990.
I would rather suggest bearing in mind the variety within the multifaceted field of inquiry that we are facing with science communication. It is all but a coherent field. Which kind of distinction do you make between subject and research and don’t you sometimes mistake the case for the study? Science communication is a broad field with many actors of unequal aims, incentives and motivations for their practice or research. Three main groups of actors have immediately to be differentiated before asking any questions of relevance: First the growing number of practitioners in the field e.g. from pedagogy, professional science communicators for example at science museums, science teachers etc. As a second main field we have the whole system of media and journalism that is working on their own modes. One can attribute the very basic and appropriate critique against science journalism that it is not fulfilling its societal ‘function’ since it is aligning with the science system (e.g. ‘translating’ ready made research results from high prestigious journals like Nature and Science thus rather doing PR work and not journalism). In this regard science journalism does not represent the public, which it should – but the institutions of science.
As a third group of actors we have the huge and diverse field(s) of research about science communication that since the 1990s often got subsumed under the label Public Understanding of Science (PUS) with a prominent journal of the same title publishing both survey research and theoretical reflections. But besides the PUS community there are also other, rather disconnected areas of research like “Informal Science Learning” that look at similar phenomenona but focus more on community contexts and individual uptake, learning and understanding of science.
By finishing I simply ask Thomas in return, what are you really sceptical against?
- Science Communication in a general sense – or what in particular?
- Studies and Research about Science Communication – and if, which ones exactly?
- Or are you more generally critiquing the modern society – which might go beyond what can be discussed in this forum.