Читать книгу Controversy Mapping - Tommaso Venturini - Страница 33

To be mapped, a dispute must be available for observation. Sensitive or classified issues that have been purposely removed from public scrutiny therefore make difficult topics. This does not mean they are not interesting. It simply means that their investigation would have to overcome some overwhelming odds (Galison, 2005). The discussions around the September 11 attacks, for instance, may be fascinating, but if you do not have access to classified sources, there is little chance that you could study them seriously. If a debate does not disclose new information, then its investigation risks degenerating into a conspiracy theory in which collective dynamics are explained through the deployment of some surreptitious plan rather than as the outcome of many diverging and mutually interfering agendas. As Karl Popper beautifully puts it:

It is one of the striking things about social life that nothing ever comes off as intended. Things always turn out a little bit differently. We hardly ever produce in social life precisely the effect that we wish to produce, and we usually get things that we do not want into the bargain … the people who approach the social sciences with a readymade conspiracy theory thereby deny themselves the possibility of ever understanding what the task of the social sciences is, for they assume that we can explain practically everything in society by asking who wanted it, whereas the real task of the social sciences is to explain those things which nobody wants. (Popper, 2002 [1963], pp. 165–8)

On the contrary, considering controversies that are accessible because close at hand is always a smart move. Controversy mapping is a sort of “secondary analysis” of the scientific debates that other researchers are engaged in. Hence, controversy mappers who work in academia can find great subjects just by interviewing their teachers and colleagues. Likewise, local controversies (e.g., connected to architectural projects; Yaneva, 2011) are often attractive choices, especially if they take place nearby.

Finally, and for reasons directly connected to the point we just made, controversies that develop online are cartographically convenient because they leave digital traces readily at hand for everyone who has a computer. As in the advice to privilege scientific controversies, digital should here be taken in the widest possible sense, and certainly not only limited to dominant platforms. In the last few years, these platforms have grown especially popular among social scientists (and even more among commercial and political marketers) for the way in which their APIs (application programming interfaces) redistribute some of the records they collect. Yet, platforms are by no means the only digital sources that controversy mappers can and should exploit and, depending on the object of research, other datasets may be more interesting.

We are not saying that social media records are useless for social investigation. Quite the contrary! Google, for example, can be suitable for studying the cycles of online attention (Choi & Varian, 2012); Facebook can offer a decent proxy of Web sociability (Rieder, 2013); YouTube can be interesting for comparing mainstream and marginal media discourses (Arthurs et al., 2018; Rieder et al., 2018); Wikipedia is great for studying knowledge debates (Niederer & Van Dijck, 2010; Borra et al., 2014, 2015). Still, digital mapping can and should extend further than social media. It is one of our duties as critical scholars to interrogate and oppose the project of Silicon Valley giants to claim online sociality as their fiefdom. One way we can do this is by refusing to consider the data collected by these corporations as the gold standard of digital traceability and engage in other forms of digital fieldwork (Venturini & Rogers, 2019; Perriam et al., 2020), another is to critically examine the consequences of repurposing their APIs for online controversy mapping (Munk & Olesen, 2020).