Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 20

Combining Actor-Network Theory and Digital Methods, controversy mapping inherits some of their strengths, but also some of their blind spots. As a research method, it is well-suited for situations where the actors explicitly challenge each other, but it can be blind to situations where power is presumed rather than questioned. Compared to other types of conflict, controversies over scientific discoveries or technological innovations have the advantage of being relatively explicit. The high level of formalization that characterizes modern technoscience (Koyré, 1948) also means that its disagreements are, in general, extensively documented (Venturini, 2007a). While these disputes can have their share of secrecy and silence, few controversies in science and technology can be closed without some exposure to the validation of the scientific community. Furthermore, the fact that current controversies are heavily mediatized and thereby exposed to public scrutiny also ensures that power is explicitly questioned and arguments made public.

As we shall see in the next chapter, controversies are convenient objects of investigation precisely because they constitute the moments in which what is usually tacit and taken for granted becomes the explicit object of discussion. But such a focus may indeed risk drawing attention away from the situations where dissent is successfully silenced by dominant actors. The habit of working with public knowledge controversies may have made our approach unsuited to study situations where domination is exerted not by pushing one’s position explicitly, but by suppressing the alternatives. Controversy mapping is well-equipped to describe the tactics that the actors use to push their agenda, less so to reveal the implicit forms of power (and resistance to power) that are deeply embedded in collective institutions (Foucault, 1975), individual habits (Goffman, 1961), and bodily postures (Bourdieu, 1990).

Similarly, while digital methods can help illuminate public debates, they are incapable of documenting collective life in its entirety. Even if social media platforms and search engines are constantly expanding their reach (Bogost & Montfort, 2009; Helmond, 2015), they do not cover the entire World Wide Web, and luckily so. Every day hundreds of thousands of new webpages are created and only a fraction is reached by “likes” and search crawlers. Likewise, even if more and more information is exchanged through the Web, a large slice of electronic traffic travels through other routes. Emails, teleconferences, chats, peer-to-peer exchanges, mobile apps, document transfers, and many other types of digital information do not circulate via Web protocols. Besides, many digital records do not circulate at all. Not every digital inscription is shared on a computer network and not all networks are connected to the Internet. Finally, even if digital devices are more and more ubiquitous, not all social interactions are digitally mediated.

Mind that this is not just a question of coverage. Digital records come with all sorts of biases connected to the conditions of their production. Sometime these biases can be taken into account (Venturini et al., 2018) and even exploited for research (Marres & Moats, 2015), but sometimes they distort observations to the point of making them useless as a proxy for the phenomena they are supposed to capture (Venturini and Rogers, 2019). Imagine that the Amboseli elephant situation had been discussed through social media rather than in an onsite workshop. Leveraging her greater media exposure, Moss might have mobilized hordes of elephant lovers to throw their weight behind her position – elephants are, after all, more instagramable than fence experiments – and by that concealed, but not necessarily outplayed, the subtle strategies employed by Western to bring the Maasai on his side by collaborating and living with them over several years.