Summary of Bucchi (Megan and Laura)

Bucchi: Science and the Media: Alternative routes in scientific communication

MODELS OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
Canonical Model: similar to deficit model in assuming that scientists are distant from the public. Assumes that there needs to be some sort of third person translator or mediator to get science from the scientific enterprise to the public. Public seen as passive receiver, simply “absorbing” scientific information, but not participating. Assumes that science and mass media are incompatible.

Continuity Model: funnel-shaped, supposed to indicate the growing “solidity and simplification that a scientific fact acquires stage by stage” Describes a “routine, consensual, unproblematic trajectory.” Composed of a funnel of four stages: scientific knowledge “increases in certainty and facticity stage by stage”:
• Intraspecialist
• Interspecialist
• Pedagogical
• Popular

Deviant Cases
Deviation occurs when an issue is transferred to the “general media news sections” thereby becoming truly ‘public issues.’” This is different from the case of popularization, where science is funneled into certain niches and accessed by certain interested audiences.

METAPHOR, PARADOX, AND BOUNDARY OBJECTS
Metaphors do not serve a completely linguistic role, but can help scientists work out obstacles that cannot be overcome by logic or induction. Bridge the dimensions of science and common sense.
Paradox introduces discontinuity between two things, thus sparking interest and presenting the person with a “cognitive crisis.”
Boundary objects refer to Star & Griesemer’s definition. “…such objects form a bridge between communication at the public level with communication occurring at the other levels…and the fact that they are employed by different actors in the public negotiation at the internal and external boundaries of science” metaphors and paradoxes can themselves be boundary objects

CASE STUDIES
Uses the cases of Cold Fusion, COBE/Big Bang and Pasteur’s anthrax demonstrations to discuss scientists turning to the public: all are models of “public science”; Bucchi shows how metaphor, paradox, and boundary issues are at work in all three.

BUCCHI’S MODEL
Scientists turn to the public as “a tactic to which the scientific community is pushed by certain ‘internal’ crisis situations.” The basic idea is that communicating science in the mass media can actually influence scientific process and knowledge creation. This is a challenge to the canonical model.
Bucchi’s model considers three problems:
• demarcation between science and non-science
• demarcation between different disciplines
• boundaries around paradigms

CONCLUSION
“Where the boundaries around a scientific issue are well articulated, deviation is unlikely to be present and public communication of science is likely to play a minor role in the process of making science; where boundaries are ill-articulated, deviation is likely to be present and public communication of science is likely to play an important role in the process of making science” (p. 142). Bucchi notes that the model does not “prove” causality or the direction of causality—do boundary issues cause deviation or vice versa?

Our thoughts: While Bucchi’s ideas about metaphor, paradox, and boundary objects are interesting and useful, his framework for looking at science communication does little to add to the existing body of work, but rather reshuffles already existing concepts in Communication and Science and Technology Studies. His use of the word ‘deviant’ is highly problematic because it presupposes that the canonical model is the norm.

Megan and Laura