What’s new about public engagement with science on new media?
Author: Ayelet Baram-Tsabari – Technion Institute of Technology, Israel
Co-authors:
Massimiano Bucchi – Università di Trento
Lloyd Spencer Davis – University of Otago, New Zealand
Bruce V. Lewenstein – Cornell University, USA
Are fake news in science a new phenomenon? Should scientists organize and fight it, and if so, how? What should the education system teach about science in order to help future citizens to evaluate and interpret online science information? These are few of the questions discussed at PESO 2017 – Public Engagement with Science Online, an international research workshop that explored interactions between sciences, publics and social media, that took place at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology on June, 2017.
This group paper will first briefly present several of the contributions to the workshop: Lloyd Davis will discuss the rise of video as a means for science engagement, presenting unflattering finding showing that most science videos do not use the potential that web 2.0 has to offer. Bruce Lewenstein will discuss ‘fake’ and ‘truth’ and ‘reliable knowledge’ from an historical perspective, and their relevance to our theme of public engagement with science online. Massimiano Bucchi, will address The challenges of science communication 2.0 by talking about the crisis of mediators and visual science literacy, and Ayelet Baram-Tsabari, will seek evidence of the usefulness of science for non-scientists on social media by for examining science literacy of adults engaged with social-scientific issues online. These presentations will then be used as a trigger to discuss broader cross cutting issues, such as visualizations and video, trust and evaluation of expertise, what counts as success in public engagement in science, and thinking about local communities in connection with public engagement with science online.
The author has not yet submitted a copy of the full paper.
Presentation type: Grouped paper
Theme: Society
Area of interest: Building a theoretical basis for science communication