Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 12

Like most of the controversies that constitute our daily media diet, the examples above have two things in common. First, in one way or another, they are all related to science and technology – including, of course, the humanities, social sciences, economics and law. They are prompted by the unintended consequences of some new invention, a technical failure, an unforeseen natural hazard, or a disagreement between purported experts. Second, all these controversies are, to some extent, public. While they may play out partly in private, or behind closed doors in engineering offices or scientific laboratories, they are also staged in and by the media and are thus open for everyone to see and engage with. These sociotechnical controversies – debates that relate to science and technology and that take place in public rather than behind closed doors – constitute the object of this book.

Controversies, where facts, expertise or new technologies are contested, have been pushed to the center of our collective attention by two overlapping developments. First, they have become more salient because science and technology play an increasingly important role in our politics (Weingart, 1999; Marres, 2005b). Since the Scientific Revolution, it has been commonplace to believe that technoscience would gradually remove dangers, manage insecurities, and resolve conflicts. Yet, after five centuries of technoscientific progress, we are every bit as entangled in controversies as we have always been. Far from imposing consensus, science and technology have become the breeding grounds of many of our collective disputes. Even when born outside industry or academia, controversies almost invariably involve questions about technical infrastructures and expert knowledge. Essentially political questions, such as the 2016 Brexit referendum, are still deeply entangled with expert discussions about economic indicators, legal rules, voting systems, and even voting machines. As this field guide will exemplify over and over again, there is no outside of modern science and technology.

While many controversies stem from the failures of modern technoscientific systems, many more come from their success. While extending our control and understanding of social and natural phenomena, science and technology have also produced a wide variety of aftereffects that are increasingly impossible to ignore. These risks and externalities are not new and have been a matter of discussion since the first industrial revolution. Yet, technoscientific networks have grown so deep and wide (Ellul, 1967) that their collateral effects now result in existential crises (Mumford, 1944, 1971) and hazards to the planet (Latour, 2004b, 2017b). Because there is no outside of modern science and technology, there is also no escape from dealing with their consequences. We cannot board a plane without being reminded about our carbon footprint or the risk of moving some virus from one continent to the other; dispose of a “disposable” cup without seeing it floating back to us in an oceanic garbage patch; buy a dress without affecting the economy of some distant country; or cook a meal without considering the planetary consequences of the menu. Nothing is out of bounds or off grid. By extending our reach, the very success of science and technology has made our collective actions more momentous and entwined with that of an expanding cast of recalcitrant others (Castells, 1996; Anderson, 2002; Bauman, 2006).

The second reason why controversies about science and technology have become more visible is the transformation of our infrastructures for public debate. Depending on how you count, technoscientific controversies are as old as the Industrial Revolution (Hobsbawm, 1952) or as technology tout court (Leroi-Gourhan, 1943, 1964). What is new is the way in which modern media encourage and enable a growing variety of actors to take part in them (Lippmann, 1927; Dewey, 1946). The myth of the scholar perched in an “ivory tower,” indifferent to the noise of the world, has always been false but it has become laughable as scientists and engineers are now routinely receiving media training. Likewise, political actors have always mobilized or criticized science and technology to suit their agendas, but in recent years the mediatization of expert disagreements has become a favorite political weapon as industrial lobbies have learned to amplify scientific uncertainty as a way to stall political action (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008; Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

More recently, sociotechnical controversies have become even more conspicuous because of the amplification, fragmentation, and acceleration of media debates brought about by the advent of social platforms. Challenging the gatekeeping function of broadcast journalism (Manning White, 1950; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009), online media have allowed more people to join the public conversation, making it more democratic, but also more complex and easier to manipulate (Benkler, 2006; Benkler et al., 2018). In the case of science and technology, this transformation is all the more profound as the challenge to news monopolies has been accompanied by a challenge to knowledge monopolies (Lynch, 2017). The contestation of expert authority and the proposal of alternative knowledge systems has become so visible that some have suggested we have entered a “post-truth” era (Keyes, 2004; Sismondo, 2017). At the same time, the rise of filtering and recommendation algorithms facilitate a selective exposure to ideas close to our point of view (Sears & Freedman, 1967), raising questions about the fragmentation of public discourse (Sunstein, 2001; Pariser, 2011) and the risk of political radicalization (Gerstenfeld et al., 2003). Finally, and maybe most importantly, the increasing competition for attention has accelerated the news cycle (Downs, 1972; Hilgartner & Bosk, 1988; Leskovec et al., 2009a) forcing us to consider a growing number of issues in a shrinking span of time (Venturini, 2019a). The prophecy of Walter Lippmann, one of the fathers of modern journalism, has come true: the modern citizen is “tantalized too often by the foam of events” (1927, p. 5) or, more prosaically, “bewildered as a puppy trying to lick three bones at once” (p. 14).

This overload of issues also explains why conflict has become a favorite genre of modern media. Already in the 1970s, Herbert Simon noted that “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients” (Simon, 1971, p. 40). Attention (and not information) is therefore the scarce resource whose pursuit increasingly drives the media market and consequently the public debate (Goldhaber, 1997; Crogan & Kinsley, 2012; Terranova, 2012; Citton, 2014). Equally important are the vanishing boundaries that used to separate news from entertainment (Prior, 2005). The convergence of all types of communication in the same digital devices and platforms means that public debates are nowadays in direct competition with all other kinds of online content, “an all-out war for the time of an audience that has more choices than at any point in history” (Klein, 2020, p. 279).

In this ruthless fight for public attention, controversies have a competitive advantage. Because they promote high-activation feelings (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1998; Clore & Storbeck, 2014), they are very effective in capturing attention and are more likely to be passed along in online networks (Berger & Milkman, 2012; Guadagno et al., 2013). As the alt-right’s slogan goes: “conflict is attention and attention is influence” (Marantz, 2019). This practice of using controversy to hijack the media agenda poses a real challenge for controversy mappers, whose cartographic efforts can offer the “oxygen of amplification” (Phillips, 2016) to actors who fuel controversies with the exclusive goal of enhancing their own visibility.

For better or worse, these techno-environmental crises and media evolutions have made controversies increasingly prominent. Ignoring them is no longer an option, but neither is fueling them by sharing them on social media in a burst of outrage or virtue signaling. Instead, we have to learn to patiently unravel their imbroglios and distribute their charges.