SCENARIOS OF USE

Technoscientific controversies often offer spaces for polarizations; more specifically they feature disputed personalities and experts, able to catalyze the attention of the media and the public for their attitude to either hype or skepticism. As a journalist or decison-maker you may want to be able to detect and locate the information sources that are giving more space to these figures - in other words investigate the partisanship of these sources - by quoting them or either supporting their school of thought withtin a given controversy, and also to assess their relevance in the web.

The exercise here proposed is designed to get coarse and fast view of a source partisanship an/or issue committments through the use of the Lippmanian Device (aka Google Scraper).

METHODS, TOOLS AND EXAMPLES

To begin, take a look to the Lippmanian Device page on the Macospol platform, and to the example where this tool has beeen used to analyse the controversy on climate change skeptics. Here the question of how much are climate change 'skeptics' present in the significant climate change sources on the Web is posed in order to gain insight into whether the Web, and the devices that rank information, privilege the skeptics in ways similar to the news.

SUGGESTED EXERCISE

Follow the same methodology used to anlyse the climate change skeptics controversy for the case of nanotechnonology hype, investigating the presence and the relevance in the web of the visionary engineer Eric Drexler.

SOME BITS ABOUT DREXLER AND HIS ROLE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NANOTECHNOLOGY

Drexler, an electronic engineer, with his famous 1986 book "Engines of creation - The coming era of Nanotechnologies" and his idea of molecular assemblers - or nano-robots future ability to assemble and reassemble atoms and molecules - has contributed significantly to make nanotechnology a key issue in policy research and, subsequently, in the public debate, albeit in a rather peculiar way. Just after the publication of his famous book, an essay mixing science and science fiction, the word "nanotechnology" in fact begins to appear in the public realm, with articles on the New Scientist, the Washington Post, The Sunday Times and Nature, then exiting the narrow circles of specialists and professionals. Drexler's visions, discussed in the book, are a glimpse of a future high-productivity technology that he called "molecular manufacturing", a system based on the manipulation of structures at the atomic level. He claimed that it was possible to build real structures at the nanoscale, through the assembly of molecules energetically stable, creating a system in which the molecules could be "engineered" and become part of a self-replicating system. Based on these visions, Drexler imagined real "molecular machines" composed of organic material, capable of assembling atoms with great flexibility to build technological artifacts designed in a very short time.

In the years, the figure of Drexler has become the symbol of hype in the development of nanotechnology; here we ask: to what extent can the "Drexler school of thought" in relation to nanotechnology be considered popular and present in the Web? Is Drexler still relevant in the top sources provided within a google query about nanotechnology as it is in the debate over the future impacts and implications of nanotechnology? Is Drexler present in the debate over nanotechnology policy?

THE EXERCISE

Use the Lippmanian Device and the methodology used for the case of Drexler hype to answer these questions.

STEPS

- query Google for the top 100 English language sources about "nanotechnology"
- To clean the data and prepare them for analysis, copy and paste the 100 results to the Harvester, select return unique hosts and harvest. This provides a clean list of unique host URLs. Note that you may wish to de-select any sponsored results and/or adword results.
- The cleaned results are copied and pasted into the top box of the Lippmannian Device (select the option "only query discrete sites" and set maximum results to 1000)
- write the keword "Eric Drexler" in the bottom box
- launch the tool and wait for results
- Note the tag clouds as results. In the tag cloud it is visible how many times a name appears on a Website, if at all. (In other words, a Website that has zero mentions of the name are also saved.)

Optional. Cloud the findings using the Tag Cloud Generator. That is, the tag cloud output of the Lippmannian Device is copied and pasted into the Tag cloud generator. This generator turns the results into pdf and svg files, editable in Adobe Illustrator.

The following visualization is obtained:

BACK TO "EXPLORE MY OWN CONTROVERSY" MAIN PAGE

Related items from Macospol

Explore your own controversy
Use "quick and dirty" tools to understand and grasp different facets of controversies

---

Attachments of PlatformPartisanship