Recipe for tracing the fate of issues and their publics on the Web
Noortje Marres, RICHARD A. ROGERS · Goldsmiths (University of London) · 2005
Taking to the Web , looking for 'public deba te .' Now quite a few years back, we took to the Web to study public debates on science and technology.But we found 'issue-networks' instead.Exploring the ways in which controversies around techno-scientific issues, such as climate change and genetically modified food, were being 'done' on the Web, we started off by following hyperlinks among Web sites dealing with these issues.In doing so, we first of all noted the great variety of formats in which the issue was being presented on the Web, from 'issue briefs,' to 'fact versus fiction' pages, visual and textual reports of in situ protests (such as the dump of genetically modified grain in front of a government office in the Netherlands), online petitions, and summaries for policy-makers.But as we surfed what we now call 'issue-spaces,' we increasingly came to rely on hyperlinks to delineate controversies around techno-scientific issues on the Web.Following hyperlinks among pages dealing with a given issue, we found that these links provided a means to demarcate the network which could be said to be staging the constroversy in the new medium.Those Web pages which treated the issue, and which received a significant number of links from other pages presenting the affair, we decided, disclosed the controversy on the Web.Thus, we came to focus on sets of inter-linked pages which treated the affair in question, which we dubbed issue-networks, as our most useful unit of analysis.As we began locating and analysing issue-networks on the Web -first manually and later aided by software -, our intuitions told us that it wasn't quite right to characterize the online activity around our issues (climate change, and genetically modified food) as 'public debate.'For one, the Web pages that made up the issue-network couldn't really be said to be engaged in a 'great conversation' : the relations among these pages were far too indirect to be able to say that they were 'speaking' with one and another.Acknowledgements of other sites, by way of hyperlinks, characteristically are one way recognitions, whereby the sender of the link 'frames' the site of the receiver, as it presents the link under a particular heading, or as part of an overview of the issue, news item, protest report, or a review of a policy-event.Moreover, instead talking to each other, the pages in the network were rather defining the issue in question in ways that built from, and countered, issue-definitions presented on other pages in the network.That is also to say, these pages weren't exactly presenting 'points of view' on the matter at hand, as happens in a debate : first