How do we make the case for “knowledge democracy” in the face of the growing influence of right-wing figures and movements that denounce experts and expertise? While the threats to knowledge posed by ...these movements are real, it would be a mistake to return to a classic intellectual strategy––the politics of demarcation––in the face of this danger. Examining practical proposals for combatting fake news and opinion manipulation on the Internet, namely so-called "fact-checking" tools and services, I argue that they threaten to enroll us in a problematic normative project, one that aims to re-establish a hierarchy between knowledge and its presumed opposite, non-knowledge, or anti-knowledge. I list a number of shortcomings of this strategy. Most importantly, it distracts us from the role of technology in the crisis of public evidence in today's computationally-intensive societies. Social media are a truth-less public sphere by design. A politics of demarcation also puts us at risk of forgetting a key insight from the previous century that remains valid today: knowledge democracy is a re-constructive practice and an ideal. Instead of consolidating hierarchies of knowledge through facts that derive their authority form outside the public sphere, we need to recover the central role in public life of experimental facts: statements whose truth value is unstable. The experimental validation of public knowledge must happen in the public domain.
In this article, I give a personal view of Bruno Latour’s work on the politics of ecology going back to his work during the early 2000s on the politics of things. Based on my exchanges with Latour ...over the years, from the time that I became his student in the late 1990s, I show how he developed his understanding of the politics of ecology through a critical engagement with early twentieth-century theories of a “politics of things,” notably the one developed by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. I propose that Latour, who was greatly inspired by Dewey’s book The Public and Its Problems, through his more recent work on climate change demonstrated that the ecological crisis poses a profound challenge to the pragmatist vision of material politics. This challenge led Latour to undertake a radical reconstruction of the very idea of ecological politics and envision what he calls a politics of the earth. In a second section of this essay, I articulate a related but different possibility for the reconstruction of ecological politics, one that I believe Latour saw clearly, but did not pursue. If we are to succeed in turning politics around ecology, we will need to engage much more deeply with feminist understandings of politics, which affirm materiality, embodiment, and connectedness as unavoidable political realities. This in turn enables us to appreciate the wider relevance for understanding the ecological crisis of the feminist critique of the bifurcation of politics, which Carole Pateman identifies as the underlying schema of modern democracy. I argue that it remains one of the main blocks on our ability to reenvision politics in ecological terms today. Part reflection, part criticism, and part homage, this article then argues that we should look for orientation in feminist politics of ecology, if we want to take further the work of Latour and many others for a politics of the earth.
This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, ...social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of digital social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods, and this paper explores the phenomenon in relation to two specific digital methods, online network and textual analysis, arguing that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with their distribution, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the redistribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a redistributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, and both, I argue, involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm, namely critiques of the authority effects implicit in citation analysis. As such, these methods offer ways for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, to endorse and actively pursue the redistribution of social methods online.
This paper seeks to contribute to the development of device-centred perspectives on public participation through an analysis of everyday technologies of carbon accounting. Such instruments are ...currently put forward, in the UK and elsewhere, as a way of locating environmental engagement in everyday practices, such as cooking and heating. The paper considers whether and how these technologies can be said to 'materialize' public participation. It argues that the materialization of engagement entails a particular codification of it: as participation is located in everyday material practice, it comes to be defined in terms of its doability and the investment of effort. Material participation, then, does not refer just to its mediation by things: it involves the deployment of specific legitimatory tropes associated with liberal theories of citizenship and the domestication of technology, in particular the notion that the engagement of everyday subjects requires things to be 'made easy' (Pateman, 1989; Schwartz Cowan, 1983). To make sense of this confluence of political and technological ideals, the paper takes up the notion of 'co-articulation' (Callon, 2009). A distinctive feature of the everyday devices of accounting under consideration here, I argue, is their ability to 'co-articulate' participation with other registers: those of innovation and economy. In this respect, the spaces of participation organized with the aid of these technologies can be qualified as spaces of 'multi-valent' action. Different carbon-accounting devices do this, however, in different ways, and this has consequences for how we understand the wider normative implications of the 'materialization' of environmental participation. In some cases, materialization entails the minimization of social, material and political changes, while in others it enables the exploration and amplification of precisely these modes of change.
This article introduces an interpretative approach to the analysis of situations in computational settings called situational analytics. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of ...this approach, which is still under development, and show how it can be used to surface situations from large data sets derived from online platforms such as YouTube. Situational analytics extends to computationally-mediated settings a qualitative methodology developed by Adele Clarke, Situational Analysis (2005), which uses data mapping to detect heterogeneous entities in fieldwork data to determine ‘what makes a difference’ in a situation. Situational analytics scales up this methodology to analyse situations latent in computational data sets with semi-automated methods of textual and visual analysis. I discuss how this approach deviates from recent analyses of situations in computational social science, and argue that Clarke’s framework renders tractable a fundamental methodological problem that arises in this area of research: while social researchers turn to computational settings in order to analyse social life, the social processes unfolding in these envirnoments are fundamentally affected by the computational architectures in which they occur. Situational analytics offers a way to address this problematic by making a heterogeneously composed situation – involving social, technical and media elements – the unit of computational analysis. To conclude, I show how situational analytics can be applied in a case study of YouTube videos featuring intelligent vehicles and discuss how situational analysis itself needs to be elaborated if we are to come to terms with computational transformations of the situational fabric of social life.
This article assesses the usefulness for social media research of controversy analysis, an approach developed in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. We propose that this approach ...can help to address an important methodological problem in social media research, namely, the tension between social media as resource for social research and as an empirical object in its own right. Initially developed for analyzing interactions between science, technology, and society, controversy analysis has in recent decades been implemented digitally to study public debates and issues dynamics online. A key feature of controversy analysis as a digital method, we argue, is that it enables a symmetrical approach to the study of media-technological dynamics and issue dynamics. It allows us to pay equal attention to the ways in which a digital platform like Twitter mediates public issues, and to how controversies mediate “social media” as an object of public attention. To sketch the contours of such a symmetrical approach, the article discusses examples from a recent social media research project in which we mapped issues of “privacy” and “surveillance” in the wake of the National Security Agency (NSA) data leak by Edward Snowden in June 2013. Through a discussion of social media research practice, we then outline a symmetrical approach to analyzing controversy with social media. We conclude that the digital implementation of such an approach requires further exchanges between social media researchers and controversy analysts.
This article takes stock of recent efforts to implement controversy analysis as a digital method in the study of science, technology, and society (STS) and beyond and outlines a distinctive approach ...to address the problem of digital bias. Digital media technologies exert significant influence on the enactment of controversy in online settings, and this risks undermining the substantive focus of controversy analysis conducted by digital means. To address this problem, I propose a shift in thematic focus from controversy analysis to issue mapping. The article begins by distinguishing between three broad frameworks that currently guide the development of controversy analysis as a digital method, namely, demarcationist, discursive, and empiricist. Each has been adopted in STS, but only the last one offers a digital "move beyond impartiality." I demonstrate this approach by analyzing issues of Internet governance with the aid of the social media platform Twitter.
This paper explores the 'issue-oriented' perspective on public involvement in politics opened up by recent research in Science and Technology Studies (STS). This research proposes that public ...controversy around techno-scientific issues is dedicated to the articulation of these issues and their eventual accommodation in society. It does not, however, fully answer the question of why issue formation should be appreciated as a crucial dimension of democratic politics. To address this question, I turn to the work of two early 20th-century American pragmatists: John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. In their work on democracy in industrial society, they conceived of public involvement in politics as being occasioned by, and providing a way to settle, controversies that existing institutions were unable to resolve. Moreover, Dewey developed a 'socio-ontological' understanding of issues, which suggests that people's involvement in politics is mediated by problems that affect them. Dewey and Lippmann thus provide important argumentative resources for further elaborating the approach to public involvement developed in STS. STS research has also developed a 'socio-ontological' approach, as it focuses on the 'attachments' that people mobilize (and that mobilize people) in the performance of their concern with public affairs. Such an approach provides an alternative to discursivist analysis of the role of 'issue framing' in the involvement of publics in politics.
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