Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 25

As we have just seen, controversies can be inconvenient objects of study. The temptation is therefore strong to fall back on narratives that allow us to write them off or ignore them. These narratives come in two stereotypical versions that we could call the “corruption story” and the “deficit story.” Both presume a priori that technoscience would progress linearly if it was not derailed by cultural, economic, political, or otherwise extraneous factors. In the deficit story the public is in a state of ignorance because it lacks information (Wynne, 1991). Proponents of biotechnology, for example, often claim that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are disputed only because the public does not understand the mechanism of transgenesis and is therefore irrationally afraid of it. In the corruption story, on the other hand, contested knowledge is written off as mere pursuit of political or economic interests. Opponents of biotechnology often argue that GMOs are promoted, despite their technical flaws and social disadvantages, because of the financial interests of the corporations who manufacture them and the career interests of the scientists who are doing research on them. Hence, in the GMO debate, both sides can point to some sort of deviation from straight technoscientific progress and deny that there is any real controversy.

While neither of these explanations are completely off the mark, they certainly do not account exhaustively for controversies. After billions spent on science education over the past decades, it is hard to explain, for instance, that a large percentage of Americans still believe in strict creationism despite recurrent attempts to sway them to the theory of evolution (Newport, 2010). And even when science education does work, why should we expect the result to be citizens who are more willing to agree? Actors, however well informed, will often have stakes in a discussion and, as empirical evidence suggests, a better understanding of science can actually increase political polarization (Kahan, 2015; Kahan et al., 2017). As for deviation by corruption, it is worth keeping in mind that plenty of researchers in theoretical physics, formal mathematics, art history, sociolinguistics, and other disciplines keep stirring fierce controversies even though the political or economic interests are minimal.

The problem with deviation stories is that they reduce controversies to skirmishes at the fringes of technoscience, as if conflict could not arise within science and technology and as if technoscience could be easily separated from the rest of society. As we will show in the next chapters, none of these assumptions hold up under closer inspection. The proliferation of controversies has little to do with external interference and much to do with the role of science and technology in society. This is both good and bad news.

It is good news when the rise of controversies can be ascribed to growing demand for transparency. As technoscience grew ever more omnipresent and influential, it also became a topic of intense public interest and scrutiny and luckily so. The increased visibility of controversies could therefore be read optimistically as an increase in the democratization of science and technology, even when it comes with annoying side effects. Reflecting on the raging debates about vaccination, danah boyd notices that, despite their unfortunate consequences for public health, the arguments of those who oppose the vaccines still reflect a proactive attitude:

The more that the media focused on waving away these networks of parents through scientific language, the more the public felt sympathetic to the arguments being made by anti-vaxxers. Keep in mind that anti-vaxxers aren’t arguing that vaccinations definitively cause autism. They are arguing that we don’t know. They are arguing that experts are forcing children to be vaccinated against their will, which sounds like oppression. What they want is choice – the choice to not vaccinate. And they want information about the risks of vaccination, which they feel are not being given to them. In essence, they are doing what we taught them to do: questioning information sources and raising doubts about the incentives of those who are pushing a single message. (boyd, 2017)

The bad news is that controversies within science and technology could also derive from the growing efforts of lobbies and interest groups to stall political action through the artificial production of uncertainty and hence a deliberate pollution of public debate. First employed by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on the connection between smoking and cancer (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), this strategy of skepticism is now employed on issues like climate change, acid rain and ozone depletion – often by the same organizations (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). This type of strategic skepticism, which is also used by foreign intelligence agencies, amplifies disagreements among experts making the debate opaque and undermining public trust in institutions (Asmolov, 2018; Bennett & Livingston, 2018).

The investigation of controversies, however, is not only justified by the fact that they are increasingly difficult to ignore. Inconvenient as they may be, controversies are also excellent occasions to learn about the role of technoscience in social life. In the words of Bruno Latour:

I have stopped, in the engineering school where I teach, to give a social science class:

I only ask the young engineers to follow for one year, in real time, a scientific or technical controversy … They learn more science – meaning research – and it just happens that, without even noticing it, they learn also more law, economics, sociology, ethics, psychology, science policy and so on, since all those features are associated with the piece of science they have chosen to follow. (“From the two cultures debate to cosmopolitics” contribution to a special symposium in Zeit, available online at www.bruno-latour.fr).

In the following pages, we will discuss three incentives for embarking on controversy mapping: (1) controversies allow the observation of scientific paradigms and technological infrastructures in the making; (2) they reveal the intended and unintended consequences of these paradigms and infrastructures; and (3) they help in taking more inclusive and reflexive decisions about these consequences.