While some public works are monumental civil engineering structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Sydney Harbour Bridge, most are commonplace, even invisible, and they are taken for granted. The reason for existence of public works is to provide basic services, but both large and small infrastructure facilities also present opportunities to engage the public in understanding fundamental concepts of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). We review here lessons learned in the National Science Foundation-funded Golden Gate Bridge Outdoor Exhibition project. Using the title of
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.
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.
Science communication is certainly growing as an academic field, as well as a professional specialization. This calls to mind predictions made decades ago about the ways in which the explosion of scientific knowledge was envisioned as the likely source of new difficulties in the relationship between science and society. It is largely this challenge that has inspired the creation of the field of science communication. Has science communication become its own academic subdiscipline in the process? What exactly does this entail?
Digital media have transformed the social practices of science communication. They have extended the number of channels that scientists, media professionals, other stakeholders and citizens use to communicate scientific information. Social media provide opportunities to communicate in more immediate and informal ways, while digital technologies have the potential to make the various processes of research more visible in the public sphere. Some digital media also offer, on occasion, opportunities for interaction and engagement. Similarly, ideas about public engagement are shifting and extending
This article sums up key results of a web-based questionnaire survey targeting the members of the Danish Science Journalists' Association. The association includes not only science journalists but also other types of science communicators. The survey shows that science communicators have a nuanced and multidimensional view on science communication, science, and technology. Science communicators are thus more than the "mountain guides" of science, as a recent definition describes it. The survey respondents are not just interested in helping the public at large to a wider recognition of
Many communication researchers expect that the diffusion of the new media in modern societies creates new channels of communication that can be used as alternatives or supplements to traditional forms of science communication. Conclusive empirical evidence of scientists' appreciation and use of these new channels for public communication is rare, however. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the role the new online media – in particular blogs – play for public science communication compared to traditional science communication in journalistic mass media. The focus of this
Online knowledge production sites do not rely on isolated experts but on collaborative processes, on the wisdom of the group or “crowd”. Some authors have argued that it is possible to combine traditional or credentialled expertise with collective production; others believe that traditional expertise's focus on correctness has been superseded by the affordances of digital networking, such as re-use and verifiability. This paper examines the costs of two kinds of “crowdsourced” encyclopedic projects: Citizendium, based on the work of credentialled and identified experts, faces a recruitment
In this essay, I argue that the rise of personal genomics is technologically, economically, and most importantly, discursively tied to the rise of network subjectivity, an imperative of which is an understanding of self as always already a subject in the network. I illustrate how personal genomics takes full advantage of social media technology and network subjectivity to advertise a new way of doing research that emphasizes collaboration between researchers and its members. Sharing one’s genetic information is considered to be an act of citizenship, precisely because it is good for the