Public Communication of Science and Technology

Public communication of science and technology is one of many terms used to describe the field of communication between scientists and nonscien-tists. It has come to be used in a way that attempts to describe the field without taking a position on the question of power: Who is in charge of communication, and what goals is this communication serving? The phrase has the advantage of being translatable into multiple languages while retaining approximately the same meaning. It is also the name of an important international network of academics and practitioners concerned with this area of inquiry.

The term public communication of science and technology emerged in the late 1980s in response to a recurring challenge: what to call the field of science and technology communication? “Science communication” leaves out technology. “Science and technology communication” solves that problem, but remains quite vague—does it cover all forms of communication (among specialists, within a laboratory, with policymakers, with the public)? [Page 602]Even within the narrower field of communication with nonscientists, a number of terms were used in the mid-20th century by scholars and commentators: popular science, public understanding of science, popularization. In other languages, terms like divulgación (Spanish) and vulgarisation (French) were in use.

In the mid-1980s, as some scholars began to focus on the field of communication with nonsci-entists, the problems with the existing terminology came more clearly into focus. All of the terms highlighted the one-way transmission of information from scientists to nonscientists, often with the goal of making science more “popular” or more “understood.” Many of the terms, especially the French vulgarisation, carried the connotation of “dumbing down” scientific information to make it more understandable. Taken together, these perspectives came to be called “the deficit model,” as they highlighted the assumption that the public has a “deficit” (or “deficiency”) of scientific information.

Yet a new generation of scholars questioned this assumption. These new scholars were increasingly interested in the interaction between science and society, especially in how nonscientists communicated with scientists about social controversies that involved science, such as nuclear power, biotechnology, corporate control of science, environmental pollution, and so on. Scientists often believed that these controversies developed because of misunderstanding of the technical issues at stake. But social scientists and activists highlighted the degree to which these controversies involved a deep interweaving of social values with scientific claims about such things as “energy independence” or “better food.” What appeared to be “safer food” to one social group might be “more corporate control of the food system” to another. These issues had components of policy and economics that required communication of much more information than simply “popularizing,” “divulging,” or “vulgarizing” scientific information implied.

From this growing understanding of the inherently political nature of much communication about science came the new term. In 1987, French media scholar Pierre Fayard analyzed the emergence of a public engaged in debates with the scientific community. Looking mostly at France, but also at other European countries, he tied this new public engagement to the political unrest that had troubled much of Europe in 1968. That unrest often emerged in college student protests and street demonstrations. In response to these stresses, Fayard said, a new form of communication emerged: “public communication of science.” This new form included more than simplifying information for the general public. It also included interaction among scientists and nonscientists, with emphasis on two-way communication. To further explore these ideas, Fayard convened a meeting in May 1989 at the University of Poitiers, France. From that meeting emerged a new organization, which (a few years later) ultimately became known as the International Network on Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST).

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