Editorial: Public Understanding of Science, vol.25, 2016: 264-268

634497 PUS0010.1177/0963662516634497Public Understanding of ScienceEditorial research-article2016 P U S Public Understanding of Science 2016, Vol. 25(3) 264–268 © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0963662516634497 pus.sagepub.com Editorial Next year, Public Understanding of Science will celebrate 25 years of outstanding scholarly publishing; over the years, many of the most influential papers in our field have been published in this journal. It is therefore a great honour for me to take the role of editor after John Durant, Bruce V. Lewenstein, Edna Einsiedel and Martin W. Bauer. Under Martin Bauer’s editorship, the journal has further and remarkably improved its visibility and standing in terms of key publishing indicators. It has also increased the number of issues published per year, attracted more submissions, expanded its global coverage and put more emphasis on solidly grounded empirical research. My vision for the future of the journal is in the first place that this momentum should be continued and consolidated. As recent Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) meetings (2010 India, 2012 Italy, 2014 Brazil) have confirmed, our field is increasingly expanding and articulating globally. Public Understanding of Science should attract high-quality submissions that reflect trends in research and diverse cultural and social contexts. This may of course imply dealing with different definitions of the field and its boundaries that characterise different regions and policy cultures. Solid, empirically based research papers should continue to be the backbone of the journal. At the same time, and as the field becomes more specialised, we also continue to need strong, influential theoretical contributions. In general, the journal should maintain the highest possible editorial standard while responding to increasing activity in the field. One of the central challenges for a journal like Public Understanding of Science – and for our field more broadly – is the dynamic dialogue between tradition and innovation. As the recent publication of collections of key texts, handbooks and encyclopaedias confirms, during the past few decades, a remarkable body of research and discussion has been produced in this domain, and we should treasure these achievements. Yet, we commonly witness in conferences or meetings and even specialised journals debates that seem to repeat assumptions and arguments and largely ignore classic contributions. A familiar example is paternalist models of communication that have been repeatedly proved invalid (or at least valid only in limited situations) in the critical literature being commonly recycled in an unproblematic fashion, at least in advocacy and discussion that is close to practice and policy. The wheel of science communication has thus been and still is often re-invented. Italian writer Italo Calvino once defined a classic as a contribution ‘that has never finished to say what it has to say’: classical contributions and classical themes should not just be an opportunity to look backwards. They are also valuable resources to face contemporary and future challenges in the field. Public Understanding of Science will do its best to foster this dynamic dialogue between the past, present and future by encouraging discussions and reappraisals of classical themes and concepts or by inviting contributions on ‘historical moments in PUS’: events, debates, figures which have marked the transformation and maturing of the field. Downloaded from pus.sagepub.com by guest on June 10, 2016 265 Editorial Contemporary changes, however, also require new approaches and possibly new concepts, models and research strategies. We need to think about the reshaping of communicative relationships and, above all, to move away from conceptualisations of science and society as separate and distinct from each other. This remains perhaps the central challenge for contemporary research in public understanding of science but there are related challenges that arise from the co-evolution of science, society and communication media. Here, I seek to identify some of these challenges.1 1. Plural science, plural public Permeability and heterogeneous networking between science and society intersect with increasing fragmentation of publics, of media and of their social uses. Science institutions and actors are diversifying their attitudes and practices, also in the domain of communication, which makes it problematic to continue using traditional expressions like ‘scientific community’, implying internal homogeneity and a shared commitment to specific norms and values (Bucchi, 2009, 2015). But it is no less important to reflect on and investigate the diversity and articulation of the ‘publics’ of science communication. The traditional usage of ‘public’ evoked a notion of passive and target-like readers and spectators, often addressed and defined paternalistically. One should not neglect that significant portions of the public may remain potentially disenfranchised from interactions and participatory processes with regard to science. It is nevertheless clear that social transformations, as represented in characterisations of contemporary society as pervaded by a sense of uncertainty, risk or distrust, along with changes in media technology and use, are playing relevant roles in redefining and multiplying public spaces for science communication. These changes require research to develop more complex maps of the relations between sciences and publics. 2. New mediations Digital media allow, among other things, research institutions and actors to supply to end-users an unprecedented amount and variety of materials, for example, videos, interviews with scientists, selected news items. In the broader context of ever-stronger public relations efforts by research institutions, this contributes to processes that could be summarised as ‘the crisis of mediators’. This crisis is not specific to but is particularly relevant to this field. Traditional mediators of science communication like newspapers, magazines, television and radio programmes and science museums and centres are losing their traditional centrality as filters and guarantees of the quality of information. Some of the expectations of the processes of science opening up to public view through digital media may have been misplaced or premature but the increasingly pervasive use of digital media requires researchers to think of media as significantly more than channels of scientific information. 3. Visual scientific literacy and the role of images in public understanding of science in the digital age Since Hooke’s (1665) Micrographia, modern science has put images at the centre of its communicative processes: drawings, diagrams, schemes and later photographs, satellite images, film. In the age of digital communication, specialists and publics live constantly immersed in a visually dense environment, particularly when it comes to science and technology content. The quality – and sometimes even the beauty – of images has acquired great importance in order to publish papers in academic journals in areas like the physical, astronomical or life sciences. In the popular domain, a pervasive role is played by the ‘modern cult of infographics’, the presentation of data in Downloaded from pus.sagepub.com by guest on June 10, 2016 266 Public Understanding of Science 25(3) sophisticated/interactive form which has become common place for leading digital outlets. Do we have the competence to decipher all these images, often complex and elaborate? If the so-called scientific literacy is a standard indicator of public understanding of science, much less studied so far is visual scientific literacy. 4. Quality and evaluation The above considerations pave the way for a thorough reflection on the theme of quality in science communication. Professional mediators used to guarantee quality through ‘brands’ and the reputation of their medium. By and large, readers, viewers and visitors could confidently assume that content printed in the science sections of the New York Times or broadcast by BBC or displayed in a major science exhibition would be a high-quality extract of findings and ideas filtering from the scientific community. But contemporary information overload requires the user to become more competent and it demands new definitions of quality. Public communication of science should now be mature enough to pass from a heroic phase, in which everything goes for the sake of communicating science, to a phase in which quality criteria are central for all parties involved. This implies developing indicators and standards of performance, particularly for institutions, and assigns added importance to the issue of evaluation. As social networks of evaluation develop in other domains, notably in travel, new relations of trust may develop with regard to assessment of scientific information. This signals that reliance on peer-reviewed science alone as the guarantee of authenticity and validity is unlikely to be effective. It also represents a major challenge for the public relations practice of scientific institutions and thus for the analysis of their place in society. 5. Collapsing communication contexts Above all, it is the traditional sequence of the communicative process (specialist discussion/didactic exposition/public communication or ‘popularisation’) that has been disrupted. The didactic and public exposition of science is no longer, as in Kuhn’s theory, a mere static and petrified page written by the winners in the struggle to establish a new scientific paradigm (Kuhn, 1962). Even science museums, the places par excellence of ‘fossilised’ science, increasingly hold exhibitions on current and controversial science issues. Users of scientific information increasingly have access to science in its making and highly controversial debates among specialists. Some of the implications of this new scenario have been spectacularly highlighted by cases like Climategate in 2009, when email exchanges among climate change researchers became available on the web, exposing internal communication dynamics that traditionally were confined to the ‘backstage’ of knowledge production processes; or in increasingly frequent instances of controversies among specialists unfolding in real time and open to public view. Research is required, more and more, to consider how and by whom the substance and the mode of such communication are shaped in exchanges within and between sciences. 6. Science in society and science in culture Understanding these situations may benefit from reappraising the object of science communication research as ‘How Society Talks About Science’. This implies researching the cultural contexts – scientific, artistic, every day and other – of such talk. The increasingly blurred boundaries of communication contexts should also encourage researchers to explore with more courage conceptual affinities and potential inspiration in the humanities, arts and culture, largely neglected by science communication scholars, despite the growing science/art practice. For example, concepts such as Downloaded from pus.sagepub.com by guest on June 10, 2016 267 Editorial style may be relevant to understanding variety in science communication as well as addressing the challenge of quality (Bucchi, 2013). This resonates with long-standing invitations to ‘put science into culture’ (e.g. Lévy-Leblond, 1996), emphasising its connections with other domains rather than its separation from society and culture, as expressed in models and visions of knowledge translation and transfer. It also invites us to recognise the importance of a broader culture of science in society that goes beyond familiarity with technical contents to include an awareness of its role, implications, aims, potential and limits. It eventually demands that not only society, the public and culture are problematised in their relationship with science but that science problematises its own cultural premises. In this way, research on the public dimensions of science and technology can contribute to increased reflexivity within society and within science. 7. Global trends and challenges Public communication of science has become a global enterprise with common denominators as well as distinctive regional characterisations (Trench et al., 2014). This certainly expands opportunities for experimenting with communication formats and for comparative analysis of, for example, the application of similar approaches in different contexts. It also makes increasingly visible the strong contextual interaction of science communication patterns with broader cultural, policy and socio-political landscapes. Finally, it further highlights how difficult and even misleading it would be to expect a single, straightforward response to contemporary challenges such as those outlined above, or to fulfil the expectation of eventually finding the ‘best’ and most appropriate, one-sizefits-all model of science/public interaction. Arrangements traditionally invoked in the past for science communication were largely seeking uniformity and standardisation of practices, mostly by anchoring and flattening quality to a single or principal requisite or criterion, such as accuracy in transporting the message, adherence to scientific sources or independence of mediators. Focusing on science in culture, and in cultures, helps us to account for the continuing co-existence of different patterns of science/public interaction that may coalesce or diverge depending on specific conditions and on the issues at stake. This should lead us to reappraise, for example, national differences in terms other than being more or less distant from an abstractly defined gold standard. Our rapidly transforming communicative environment poses no fewer challenges in terms of communication formats. In the next years, we aim to develop the journal presence in social media for data exchange and sharing, information on initiatives, collaborative research, online lectures – experimenting with new forms of scholarly discourse to complement the traditional papers and journal structure, taking into account pressures towards open access from funding institutions (e.g. video-abstracts, short interviews with authors). New communicative formats could also encourage us to rethink and revitalise book reviews. Book publishing has changed significantly in the past few years and with these changes comes the need for different and perhaps complementary options to be explored with our book review editor Angela Cassidy. These could be longer essay reviews on more than one book, short comments/forum discussions on the journal social media pages. We would also welcome reviews of exhibitions, films – fiction and documentary, television series and science festivals. All of these challenges will require a collective endeavour by the editorial board, the advisory board, the publisher, reviewers, submitters – and readers of course. I am lucky to be able to work with Susan Howard, who will continue as managing editor and bring her long and valuable experience with this journal. I particularly welcome the new members of the editorial and advisory board, and thank Cristina Rigutto for taking up the new role of web and social media editor of the journal. Downloaded from pus.sagepub.com by guest on June 10, 2016 268 Public Understanding of Science 25(3) Note 1. Many of the ideas presented in this section draw upon the work done with my friend and colleague Brian Trench for the Handbook of Public communication of Science and Technology (Bucchi and Trench, 2014) and for the four-volume anthology The Public Communication of Science (Bucchi and Trench, 2016). References Bucchi M (2009) Beyond Technocracy: Citizens, Politics, Technoscience. New York, NY: Springer. Bucchi M (2013) Style in science communication. Public Understanding of Science 22(8): 904–915. Bucchi M (2015) Norms, competition and visibility in contemporary science: The legacy of Robert K. Merton. Journal of Classical Sociology 15(33): 233–252. Bucchi M and Trench B (2014) Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, 2nd edn. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Bucchi M and Trench B (2016) The Public Communication of Science, 4 vol. set: Critical Concepts in Sociology. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Hooke R (1665) Micrographia. London: Jo. Martin and Ja. Allestry, Printers to the Royal Society. Kuhn TS. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Lévy-Leblond J-M (1996) The Case for Science Criticism, from La Pierre de Touche – la science a l’épreuve. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 149–164 (English trans. In: Bucchi M and Trench B (2016) The Public Communication of Science, 4 vol. set: Critical Concepts in Sociology. London and New York, NY: Routledge). Trench B, Bucchi M, Amin L, Cakmakci G, Falade B, Olesk A and Polino C (2014) Global spread of science communication: Institutions and practices across continents. In: Bucchi M and Trench B (eds) Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology, 2nd edn. London and New York, NY: Routledge. Massimiano Bucchi Science and Technology in Society University of Trento, Italy Editor Downloaded from pus.sagepub.com by guest on June 10, 2016