Scientific Audiences: Performing Science and Constructing Publics

The notion of the "public" often surfaces when we think about science. What does the public understand about science? How can we improve the scientific literacy of the public? Is there such a thing as public-interest science? How should the public hold science and scientists accountable? How do research findings affect public opinion about issues that relate to science and technology?

But I would argue that the public does not exist in a meaningful way - frankly, it just isn't that useful to contemplate the whole of humanity in one big chunk. Better to consider the existence of many publics.

When politicians attempt to measure public opinion, for example, do they seek out the chronically infirm, the homeless, or middle school students? Of course not. The "public" that matters to them includes voters and especially those individuals likely to participate more actively in the political process. In fact, pollsters construct a public each time they sample opinions, to a greater or lesser degree according to the logic of those seeking information from that poll. The boundaries created by that construction - including some, excluding others - have repercussions for the allocation of power and resources. If felons can't vote, why should legislators take their complaints seriously? Some do, of course - either because they have a moral commitment or because they recognize that parents and spouses and children of felons vote. But the point is that the exclusion of felons from the "public" creates structural barriers to considering their needs and preferences on par with non-felons.

So what does this have to do with science? I'm interested in scientific controversies, and empirical research in science and technology studies has found that scientific "truth" does not emerge from an objective and comprehensive consideration of the evidence. (This is much as Ben has been discussing recently, here and here, with respect to the very concept of objectivity and its historical contingency.) Instead, science is a social process. Recognizing this does not diminish the value or status of science in society; indeed, such a perspective enables a conversation about the trust we have in scientists to use their expertise to create reliable and useful knowledge. Those that fret over science's social basis actually set science up on a pedestal that wobbles precariously with the most basic historical or sociological inquiry.

It follows, then, that scientific controversy is not just about what is true, but who determines what is true. Moreover, questions about who gets access to that truth and when matter a great deal.

A useful metaphor to capture this complexity is the notion of audience. An audience is the public that has access to a particular performance of science - a performance can be experienced live or through virtually any type of media. The repercussions for analysis are several:

1. The term "audience" reminds us that all performances are bounded - spatially and temporally. Just as there is a difference between acting in a play, seeing a play, and reading a review of a play, so also is there a difference between performing scientific research, reading a journal article, and reading a citation to that article in another text.
2. Audience members are not random collections of people. Ticket prices, marketing practices, and the location of the venue affect who has access to the performance. Likewise, the particular practices of science include and exclude people. Those included - by design, or happenstance - have the potential to participate in making sense of a scientific controversy. Those excluded may lack access to the evidence and may never even know that a controversy was occurring.
3. As any actor knows, an audience plays more than a passive role. The energy of the audience members, their applause, their fidgeting, and even their suggestions (improv theatre) greatly affect the content of performance. Scientific audiences also have such power. Especially in scientific controversies, the audience created by one performance often "takes the stage" to enact a new performance, which constructs yet another audience. (The language of "framing," while useful in the narrow sense of strategies for scientific communication, misses this more complex interaction.)

What matters here is that we avoid the twin traps of thinking of the "public" as undifferentiated and passive during scientific controversy. The metaphor of audience reminds us that multiple audiences can be constructed around scientific performances, and that these audiences have the potential to participate in the creation of what counts as true and why it should matter.

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*Jason Delborne earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley's department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management. He was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship from their program in Science & Society, and he currently conducts research on the National Citizens' Technology Forum on Nanotechnology at UW Madison. The above material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0525104. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).