[Reader-list] On Media and Science: Insights from a German Sociologist

[Shiju Sam Varughese]

Dear Friends,
My third posting is on Media and Science.
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
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