• What happens to the issues when the public is lacking?
• Are controversies a new phenomenon
• How controversies became relevant

What happens to issues when the public is lacking?

One very interesting thing in mapping controversies is related to the fact that the public is almost never automatically interested in approaching controversies and in mapping them. For this reason this "reflexive" page of the platform addresses a clue about the 'very existence of controversies'. What we will try to do in this part, in other words, is to tip the motto "no issue, no public" and investigate the consequences of its symmetrical: "no public, no issue (or no controversy)". In Lippmanian terms, the general public can be said to be "a phantom", because it's often particularly difficult to assemble it into controversies; science communication is a rather emergent and unpredictable phenomenon with its own rules.

Are controversies a new phenomenon?

The politics of the past also addressed controversial scientific and technological issues - think, for example, of the decision of the U.S. government to build and use the first atomic bomb. The difference was that the relationship between politics and scientific expertise - well described by C.P. Snow in his essay Science and Government (1966) - could and should be "closed", i.e. protected from the public debate. Why for years it was not publicly discussed - as it is today for GMOs - whether or not to use dangerous pesticides or herbicides in agriculture, so that it was the bestselling author of Silent Spring Rachel Carson, to trigger the debate United States? Wasn't it an innovation at least as much potentially controversial?

Neither new is the presence of heated debates and disputes among experts. Many researchers have often emphasized how the presence of diverging positions among scientists involved in the same issue is anything but pathological. The whole history of science is marked by emblematic disputes - like the one on the vacuum that opposed Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle, or the one that saw Pasteur against Pouchet on the subject of spontaneous generation of microorganisms in the Nineteenth Century.

However, if in the past the audience was mostly exposed to consolidate scientific issues - or on which received a general degree of consensus among experts - today more and more citizens are projected in the midst of scientific debates that are still in full swing.

How controversies became relevant?

The reasons that made relevant to the study scientific controversies in the public sphere are multiple, however, you canconsider two main reasons:

A first reason is connected to the role played by the media, which makes now impossible to manage such a relationship within the closed rooms of politics. Although a widespread discourse sees media as a mere instrument in hand of institutionalized powers, it is easy to argue that the spread of a public sphere, the media - and more importantly, the new media - while creating new opportunities for visibility for élite players within the public arena, on the other exposes that vision to a previously unknown vulnerability and public scrutiny. This weakness affects not only the personal image of political leaders and public figures - including scientists; it invests also the decision-making process and the role played by the scientific and technical expertise.

The second reason lies in the transformations of scientific expertise and its perception. The issue today is not so much to trust or not to trust scientists and experts. The question is rather: "which experts?". The condition of the policy - even the public - is now bewildered by a polyphony of experts who often provide very different evaluations. Environmental organizations - for example - have their own scientific experts, to which they delegate when discussing climate change or GMOs. What should be done, then, by the "reasonable citizen" that authoritative commentators allege, placed in front of to the decision, say, to destroy or not crops fields of GM maize?