[Reader-list] on media and science

[Shiju Sam Varughese]

Dear Friends,
My third posting..
On Media and Science:Insights from a German Sociologist
In today's world, mass media has a crucial influence in shaping
reality at many levels. When we think about the role of mass media in
contemporary science, it can be seen that the media is an important
institutional space of negotiations between scientists and the public.
Peter Weingart (1998. "Science and the Media". Research Policy, 27/8,
December: 869-879; 2002. "The Loss of Distance: Science in
Transition", in Garland E. Allen and Roy M. MacLeod eds., Science,
History, and Socialism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn. Dordrecht:
Kluwer) is a German sociologist and philosopher of science who
contends that there is a 'loss of distance' between science and
different domains of its social environment. In his opinion there is a
"close coupling between science and politics, the economy, the media,
and law. These new arrangements have peculiar repercussions on
knowledge production, on notions of true and false, certain and
uncertain, and on the demarcations between science and non-science"
(2002: 170). He points out that the media also have recently gone
through a development very similar to science, in terms of growth
rates and internal differentiation. The media has developed its own
criteria and parameters like profitability and public attention to
represent the world, and they construct their own reality in the same
way as science does. Media becomes more and more pertinent in shaping
public opinion and public perception of reality, and consequently the
monopoly of science in judging representational adequacy deteriorates,
and science's abstract criterion of truth is now being confronted by
the media's criterion of public acclaim.
Weingart argues that the importance gained by media in structuring
public discourse led to the 'medialisation of science' as media
attention is important for the contemporary science. The media
provides space for science to communicate with a 'non-scientific
public', and the recourse to the public serves the purpose of
mobilising legitimacy with reference to securing the expansion of the
boundaries of science vis a vis its social environment, as well as the
settlement of conflicts within science. For Weingart the practice of
pre-publication in the mass media and the scientific communities'
attempt to achieve legitimacy through media in their competition for
scarce resources are instances of medialisation of science and the
close coupling between them. Though communication of science to the
public is not a new phenomenon, the novelty here is in the form and
intensity that emanates from a closer linkage between science and its
social environment as well as the new role of media in observing this
connection. It marks a changed configuration of science at the
institutional and organisational levels. He stresses that the loss of
distance no way implies de-differentiation or blurring of boundaries
with politics and media. "In discourse about science", he clarifies,
"the notion of truth does not disappear, nor it is replaced by the
notion of power, or that of popularity, emotional appeal or others.
The relevant sociological question is, however, if and in what ways
the complex interrelations observed on the organizational level affect
the differentiation between science and other social systems that has
emerged over the last three centuries" (1998:181). Weingart's
theorisation of the science-media coupling take notice of the changing
nature of science and situate the public and media as playing
pertinent roles in the contemporary, 'big science'. His
conceptualisation of greater public criticism of and participation in
science provides fresh openings for the democratisation of science,
which is a political process that is part of the everyday life of
citizens.

Shiju Sam Varughese,
02.06.2007