This poster was presented at the 2010 Association of Science-Technology Centers Annual Conference. The Saint Louis Science Center is a partner in Washington University's Cognitive, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience interdisciplinary graduate program funded by the NSF-IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) flagship training program for PhD scientists and engineers.
This introduction presents the essays belonging to the JCOM special issue on User-led and peer-to-peer science. It also draws a first map of the main problems we need to investigate when we face this new and emerging phenomenon. Web tools are enacting and facilitating new ways for lay people to interact with scientists or to cooperate with each other, but cultural and political changes are also at play. What happens to expertise, knowledge production and relations between scientific institutions and society when lay people or non-scientists go online and engage in scientific activities? From
Luckily enough, more democracy is always called for. Even in countries that can truly be described as democratic. And democracy (which is a constant reference in these pages) is increasingly related to knowledge, be it about whether growing GMOs, starting nuclear energy production or allowing the choice of a child’s gender through IVF techniques. The need to make democratic decisions on controversial issues, which increasingly imply scientific and technological knowledge, comes from the bottom, as citizens voice – sometimes even vehemently – the desire to express themselves.
Science must be open and accessible, and diffusion of knowledge should not be limited by patents and copyrights. After the Open Science Summit held in Berkeley, some notes about sharing scientific data and updating the social contract for science. Against the determinist view on technological and legal solutions, we need an explicit reflection on the relation between science and society. Both academic and industrial science seem unable to fulfill open science needs: new societal configurations are emerging and we should keep asking questions about appropriation, power, privatisation and
A workshop on science journalism organised at SISSA of Trieste, Italy a few weeks ago outlined scenarios that should serve as a source for debate among professionals and scholars to grasp how information activities regarding science, medicine and technology will evolve in the next few years. It is a time of great uncertainty, yet a common path to venture through can be made out: the new science journalism should meditate on a different concept of science, an in-depth conceptualisation of different audiences, alternative narrations and its role in the democratisation of knowledge within a
Eduard Kaeser has written an interesting and critical book that is concerned with the connections between science and everyday life. The conception of ‘pop science’ is introduced to characterize developments in science popularisation that are spectacular, superficial and potentially harmful to science-society relationships. The book is of special interest to the science communication community, since it may initiate discussion about the purposes of communicating science, and also about legitimate and illegitimate strategies and means of doing so.
Public communication on health issues on the Internet is not only a matter of popularization of medical information. It deeply deals with narration, conversation and dialogue, which are typical values in the Web 2.0. This interview will emphasize that blogs, forums, wiki are new ways in which population has been reconstructing and integrating medical knowledge. These ways are re-defining medical knowledge by means of unhinging the standard medical communication practices, based on a linear diffusion of knowledge form experts to laypeople.
Climate change is a multi-faceted issue. It relies on deep scientific bases, but merges with politics, economics, ethics and culture in a complex and strongly nonlinear social debate. This interview focuses on the relationships between public communication on climate change (with emphasis on the so-called ‘new media’) and the decision making processes. It argues that more productive and sustainable forms of communication on climate change are needed due to problems related with validation of information in the Web.
Technoscientific risks have been creating a growing social demand for participation in the scientific citizenship. This interview will emphasize that decision making (and so, in a more general sense, democracy) in the knowledge society requires new mediatic forums and new communication processes suitable to the highly multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of modern social debates. It argues that a new research agenda for risk conflicts, and a more neutral role for science journalism, are needed.
Media and communications technologies play a significant role in disaster management procedures in regards to the mobilization of resources in emergency situations. While the dissemination of warning messages relayed via broadcast technologies have had some positive outcomes in terms of reducing casualties in emergency situations in Bangladesh, there remain some specific problems in regards to the manner in which these messages are distributed within this developing nation. These problems are addressed within this paper. Examining the existing cyclonic warning dissemination system and the
DATE:
TEAM MEMBERS:
Sony Jalarajan RajMohammad Sahid UllahRawshon Akhter
Science journalism usually focuses on achievements presented in scientific papers previously published in specialized journals. In this paper we argue that the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) can help to widen this approach and reduce the dependency on scientific papers, by valuing not only scientists, but also other actors, theirs motivations, interests and conflicts. ANT could also help to reduce the distance between scientists and the audience by exposing uncertainties about the production of science.
Assuming that scientific development and artistic research are genetically similar, this article shows the common need of knowledge of art and science, their dialectical and multidirectional relations and the unstable boundaries between them. The fractal art has assimilated the cognitive and perceptive changes in the realm of non-euclidean geometries and has become a precise instrument of "epistemological observation". Artistic practices materialize and communicate the laws of science, while scientific revolutions are in actual facts metaphorical revolutions.