New Media Reshaping the Public Understanding of Science

The Internet has been born (no longer than 50 years ago) from the cooperation of military and university research. The World Wide Web, service which is de facto incarnating the Internet of today, was invented by scientists in CERN, with the needs of academic papers, thorough collaboration and interconnection in mind. It would seem safe to assume that such a system of media would be enormously beneficial for science, inheriting its principles of peer-reviewing and contextualization.

And, without question, examples of such scientific uses of the Internet are numerous. “It would seem like a marriage made in cyber-heaven” (Hall 2006, 89). However, as it is often the case with analyzing new media landscape, the reality is quite complex, with antagonistic tendencies and multiple, competing, colliding and combining discourses of understanding science being present. And some of these trends suggest that new media can have unexpected effects on science news distribution, as well as perception of the science discourse itself.

In this essay we summarize the classic understanding of science, acknowledging its roots and objectives, and then observe how these could be supported by the vast capabilities of the new media. Subsequently, we briefly analyze few individual examples of different roles new media can play in both clarifiyng as well as obfucating the scientific findings to the public. Particularly, we explore the idea of mediocentric authors such as Neil Postman and Paul Carr.

The core principle of science

Although the term science could be understood quite broadly as any striving for knowledge, more useful definition for purposes of this paper is the one Neil Postman ascribes to Francis Bacon, who “first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance the happiness of mankind, and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches” (Postman, Technopoly 1993, 35). This utilitaristic characterization of science from the 1620s does not, of course, change the methodology of sciences of that time, but prepares the ground for subsequent centuries, for the rise of science “as the supporter of the capitalism”, which is “demonstrated to be a rational and liberal system of economic life” and where the “idea of continuous progress takes hold” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death 1987, 53).

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For thousands of years, many different methods, tools and approaches have been developed to apply the basic principle of science, which can be paraphrased as “ideas are tested by the experiment” (Munroe 2008). There is, however, rather profound change, both quantitative and qualitative, in the way scholars work and communicate in different eras. According to Postman, the “spread of typography culture kindled the hope that the world and its manifold mysteries could at least be comprehended, predicted, controlled. It is in the eighteenth century that science – the pre-eminent example of the analytic management of knowledge – begins its refashioning of the world” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death 1987, 53).

It is easy to see how the typographic age was beneficial for the academic doings. The distribution of literature became much easier, which brought the possibility of swift (or at least much swifter) peer-review process, which started as soon as the ninth century (Spier 2002) but became more of a norm in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Early peer review in scientific journal publishing was meant to augment editorial expertise rather than to exercise more conventionally understood modes of quality control” (Fitzpatrick 2009, 11), nevertheless, the idea of sharing the results of their research with community (as opposed to guard them from their competitors) has characterized the scientific discourse of last century. According to mediocentric theories and famous “medium is the message” notion (McLuhan 1994), this reliance on books has transformed the whole Western society.

Why is Internet worse than a book?

It is not only Neil Postman who gets nostalgic when recalling the golden age of education, the age of books. Nicholas Carr indicates that “it is revealing, and distressing to compare the cognitive effects of the Internet with those of an earlier information technology, the printed book. Whereas the Internet scatters our attention, the book focuses it. Unlike the screen, the page promotes contemplativeness” (Carr 2010). He further explores the idea of Michael Merzenich who claims that human brains are not used to the long attention that is required to read a book, and that this prolonged state of focus has been the result of multi-generation training in literacy.

This literacy, argues Postman, is disappearing in the age of television, a medium that might be characterized by the television commercial, the “most peculiar and pervasive form of communication to issue forth from the electric plug” (Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death 1987, 129). Carr, being aware of the new clip culture of YouTube, of the endless clicking and of the omnipresent information overload, states it rather blatantly: the new media “make us shallow.”

Science, as politics, can fall prey to the shallow discourse that turns actors into commonly understood heroes of media narratives: doctors will “fight” disease, mathematicians must “break” the record and statisticians will “predict” the future…

Positive effects of new media

Of course, as is often the case with new media, we should not expect “a single answer to the question of how media transform” the society (Couldry 2008) or the discourse. The author of this essay has argued previously that new media have double-edged capabilities that are currently being explored in various ways (Kasík, Blogs entering Czech media 2008).

One such characteristic is the openness of the Web, the fact that anyone with the access to the Internet connection and (now) basic skills has the immediate opportunity to view (and comment on) tremendously various sources of knowledge, an unprecedented possibility that cannot be overlooked. Neither can be disputed the benefits of accelerated communication, allowing faster fact-checking, interpersonal communication across countries, and opinion exchange.

Opposing Carr’s pessimistic view, Clay Shirky, too, alludes to the “scientific revolution (that) was peer review, the idea that science was a collaborative effort that included the feedback and participation of others. Peer review was a cultural institution that took the printing press for granted as a means of distributing research quickly and widely, but added the kind of cultural constraints that made it valuable.” According to Shirky, “(w)e are living through a similar explosion of publishing capability today, where digital media link over a billion people into the same network. This linking together in turn lets us tap our cognitive surplus, the trillion hours a year of free time the educated population of the planet has to spend doing things they care about. In the 20th century, the bulk of that time was spent watching television, but our cognitive surplus is so enormous that diverting even a tiny fraction of time from consumption to participation can create enormous positive effects.” (Shirky 2010)

Hypertextuality and full-text search – for better or worse

Let us contemplate hypertextual links, as an example of a property rather characteristic for the new media. Proposed in famous essay by Vannevar Bush (As We May Think 1945), hypertext allows the interconnection of different texts or multimedia works through links, simplifying the access to cited documents, extra information or perhaps opposing views. “Standing on the shoulders of giants,” i.e. building on or reacting to the results of previous research and findings, has always been the foundation of scientific works. Even though links can be misused to take things out of context, creating isolated networks of self-supporting evidence, or diverse the attention of reader, overall, it would be difficult to dispute the benefits of the ability to reference other materials with unprecedented precision and ease.

Full-text search, greatly benefiting from the aforementioned hypertextuality, changed the face of new media in the late 1990s. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, saw the links as citations in scientific articles, carrying notion of importance (Vise 2006, 37). Search allows anyone to find exact, extremely specific piece of information on any given subject, in matter of seconds. Still, it may partly be a victim of its own success. It is easy, thanks to our positive experience with search engines, to assume that anything that is not considered important by the ranking algorithm is, indeed, not worthy of our attention, while it may simply be the case of self-perpetrating importance. Search engines also feed our tendency to “assimilate new information in a way that confirms (our) view of the world” (Sunstein 2006, 139), known as confirmation bias. This is something that can affect both scientists in their search for supporting evidence as well as members of public, offering them a natural option of decontextualizing information according to their current opinions.

Theoretically, it would be hard to imagine a better time for scientific education for broad masses, since every piece of information can be explained on several levels, linked together in a useful, searchable way. Yet at the same time, hypertext and search are also the reason why conspiracy theories (such as those persisting that men never walked on the Moon) are more wide-spread than ever; the new media, it is clear, allow people to isolate themselves from disapproving opinions, bestowing the confirmation bias with unforeseen possibilities.

The Library, the Market, and the Pub

To contrast different approaches to knowledge, let us consider three typical environments, be it today or in the Middle Ages: the Library, the Market, and the Pub.

Being an institution of education and, at least to some extent, exclusivity, the Library guards not only who can access its premises, but mainly what views, sources and materials are accessible on its grounds. The character of this filtering is best summarized by a simple sentence: “In the academic world, the published word is invested with greater prestige and authenticity than the spoken word. What people say is assumed to be more casually uttered than what they write. The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.” (Postman, Technopoly 1993, 21)

The Market is driven by different powers, the economic forces of demand, supplies, regulations and advertising. Sellers come to offer their products or services, courting customers and competing for their attention, while street artists are entertaining the bystanders.

The Pub might be a version of public sphere, “reflecting public’s representatives” (Ferree, et al. 2002), where every member of the society can come to socialize. The debate led in the pub, generally, will be different from debates led in other places, precisely since the objective of such a debate is different.

It is clear that the World Wide Web and its virtual spaces are wide enough to fit all these three structures, and many others. The rules of communication, goals and methods are different, and are coexisting together, using the very same media platforms. To understand how the discourse of science is changing on-line, just imagine a scientist struggling to explain an intricate concept to a group of intoxicated diners while they are haggling over the price of fortune-bringing amulets.

“Internet is the reflection of society,” says Vinton Cerf, who is credited with co-creating the core network principles of this network. "If you stand in front of a mirror and you don't like what you see, it does not help to fix the mirror” (Ribeiro 2007). However, as was demonstrated in this essay, new media (being no exception to previous media technologies) cannot be perceived as neutral technology, and it is worth noticing how they shape society’s understanding of science.

New tools, new possibilities

While it is clear that new media have several negative effects on the way people perceive broader concepts and become shallower without realizing that they become shallower (Kasík 2010), the new media were not yet given enough time to demonstrate their powers and react to these negative effects (Shirky 2010).

There are new tools to help scientist communicate with broader audience without sacrificing too much of the complexity, be it through computer games, new ways of utilizing blogs, podcasts and wikis or better marketing the products of scientific research (Timmer 2008).

Summarizing the optimistic view, Steven Pinker (Mind Over Mass Media 2010) states that “(t)he new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.”

(c) Pavel Kasík, 2010, kasikp@gmail.com

Charles University in Prague

Faculty of Social Sciences

Media and Communication Studies

 

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