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.