Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 13

As ubiquitous as they may be, controversies can be hard to appreciate and take seriously. The desire to avoid them or write them off as irrelevant or malignant increases the appeal of simplifying discourses and populist policies, promoting draconian and even authoritarian solutions (Latour, 2017a). Down with the experts and their subtleties! Down with public debate and its scandals! Lacking the tools and resources to sort properly through our collective disagreements, it is hard to resist the temptation for simple solutions to complicated problems (Zizek, 2008).

This book is a call against that temptation. It is a call to give controversies a chance; an invitation to resist the urge to slash the knots that tie our actions to their multiple consequences and begin caring for them instead. This does not mean sanctifying all controversies, but rather learning to distinguish the conflicts that are nothing but attempts to manipulate public attention from the ones that concern sociotechnical arrangements vital to our collective life.

This effort to unfold public debate, to care for all viewpoints while not giving everyone the same credit, to explore collective disputes and make them more legible, is a form of mapmaking, although not (or not only) in a geographical or even a graphical sense. While information visualization (Klanten & Van Heerden, 2009; Cairo, 2012, Yau, 2012) plays an important role in controversy mapping, the representation we are talking about is not only visual. Rather, the objective of controversy mapping is to unfold sociotechnical disputes in a conceptual space where its multiple actors and issues can be weighed against each other. To equip this type of civic mapmaking with a conceptual and methodological toolbox, we draw on two traditions of social research, namely Actor-Network Theory and Digital Methods.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is a methodological tradition in the social study of science and technology founded in the 1980s by Michel Callon, Bruno Latour, John Law and others. From an ANT perspective, the first step in understanding sociotechnical debates is to not write them off as deviations; mistakes deriving from human irrationality or from a simple shift in the balance of power. Rather, to understand controversies, we must suspend our a priori judgment and resist both realist and relativist conceptions of truth and power.

Philosophical realism is the assumption that the truth is “out there” waiting to be uncovered. It entails a conviction that, as our knowledge of the world extends, so does our capacity to settle controversies. This conception is as old as modern science and resonates across the centuries in the famous motto of Gottfried Leibniz: “Calculemus!” – no need for vain discussions, consensus shall follow once the problem has been rationally figured out.

Relativism, on the other hand, assumes truth to be nothing more than what is accepted at a given point in time. No matter whether such consensus is reached by persuasion or imposition: if all truths are alike, then there is no point in considering the arguments of your opponents (let alone to change your mind). If there is no truth, then there is also no point debating it.

Though diametric opposites, both positions (simplified here for the sake of argument) belittle the relevance of controversies involving science and technology as an object of public inquiry. From a purebred realist viewpoint, controversies are hallmarks of human imperfection, the constant reminder that our knowledge is flawed. Conversely, from a die-hard relativist position, controversies are mere symptoms of a transformation in the balance of forces, a sign that an emergent faction has acquired the strength to challenge the status quo. Neither realists nor relativists have reason to consider controversies as valuable in their own right.

To elude both realism and relativism, controversy mapping relies on the idea that truth and power are built together. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer explain in their book on the birth of the scientific method: “solutions to the problem of knowledge are embedded within practical solutions to the problem of social order, and different practical solutions to the problem of social order encapsulate contrasting practical solutions to the problem of knowledge” (Shapin & Schaffer, 1985, p. 15). Sheila Jasanoff calls this entanglement the “co-production of science and the social order” (2004). To unravel this co-construction, ANT draws on a series of discussions that occupied the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. These discussions provide the theoretical backbone for controversy mapping and hence for many of the chapters in this book. For readers who would like to delve deeper into the history of controversy analysis in STS, our conversation with Bruno Latour in the postscript offers some context. Trevor Pinch also provides an excellent introduction in a chapter for the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Pinch, 2015; see also Pinch & Leuenberger, 2006). Other accounts are available in the edited volume by Thomas Brante, Steve Fuller and William Lynch on Controversial Science: From Content to Contention (Brante et al., 1993) and in Dominique Pestre’s Introduction aux Science Studies (Pestre, 2006). Finally, Sheila Jasanoff’s retrospective piece on the “Genealogies of STS” (2012) looks back at controversy studies in STS and considers their role in shaping the identity of STS as an empirical investigation into science epistemology.

For the moment, we can summarize the lessons that controversy mapping takes from this literature in what we call the cartographer’s creed:

1 I will follow the actors. I will not presume to know better than the people I am studying. I will learn from them what is relevant and important, what belongs to the controversy and what does not. I will not silence the voices I do not agree with or that I find off topic.

2 I will provide weighting. I will grant visibility to actors in a way that is proportional to the difference they make in the debate. I will not represent all viewpoints as equally important but take responsibility for weighting their influence and importance.

3 I will state my position. I will not pretend to be disinterested. I will not hide my opinion about the subject I am studying. I will make clear how my stakes in the debate influence how I explore and represent it.

4 I will stay with the trouble. I will not avoid the complexity of the controversy by means of methodological or theoretical shortcuts. I will not use my explanatory framework to take refuge from the incongruity and bewildering richness of social situations.

5 I will follow the medium. I will take advantage of the fact that controversies are made public, and thus mediated and recorded, by digital technologies. While investigating these records, I will also investigate the sociotechnical infrastructures that produce them and consider the specific ways in which they act upon the situation they mediate.

6 I will draw legible maps. In order to provide overview and facilitate navigation, maps are necessarily simplifications of the territory they represent. Making legible maps of sociotechnical debates is the only legitimate reason for reducing the complexity of a controversy. Yet, my simplification will be cautious, transparent, respectful, and leave others the possibility to reverse it.

7 I will open my inquiry to others. Whenever possible, I will make publicly available the data I collect, the code I develop, and the text and images I produce. I will share my investigation with the people that have stakes in it and invite them to participate.

The cartographer’s creed is easy to swear by, but difficult to live by, and it requires research methods that are up to the task. Controversies are especially resistant to the methodological simplification imposed by the conventional divide between qualitative and quantitative methods. This divide forces scholars to choose between delving into the details of the specific interactions of a local situation (say a secluded tribe, a routinized professional practice, or a domestic scene) or contemplating the aggregated signature of vast societal trends (say electoral dynamics, fluctuations of salaries and expenses, or surveys of opinion dynamics). Controversies do not resemble either.

This is why controversy mapping has increasingly been drawing on so-called digital methods (Rogers, 2013a) as a reaction to the digitization of public debate. Digital media have contributed to making controversies more visible, but they have also made them more traceable. Because of both their technical infrastructures and their business models, digital media are extremely efficient in tracing collective interactions (van Dijck, 2013). Most of their records, unfortunately, remain within the platforms that produce them, but some of them are made publicly available and can be repurposed for research. Digital records offer an opportunity for bypassing the divide between qualitative and quantitative research (Venturini & Latour, 2010; Munk, 2019). The idea that digital media can become the basis for a new generation of quali-quantitative research has been put forward by Bruno Latour (Latour, 2007; Latour et al., 2012) and implemented in the work of Richard Rogers (2013a), Noortje Marres (2017), and a growing number of scholars experimenting with the research affordances of digital records.

While digital methods offer exciting research opportunities and have a central place in this book, it is important to recognize that their use in controversy mapping has been informed by a research tradition that was built primarily on methods from ethnography and semiotics. As a first example of controversy mapping, we will therefore draw on one instance of such research.