In this paper, we examine three unanticipated findings from a social constructionist analysis of popular media coverage of the pesticide DDT from the years 1944 to 1961. The first unanticipated finding was the early (1945) appearance of negative or cautionary claims in the media source examined, the New York Times. Second, while negative or cautionary claims about the pesticide did constitute a minority voice during this time period, it was nonetheless a persistent voice. The third unanticipated finding was the predominance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the State Agricultural Experiment Stations among those claimsmakers initially cautioning potential users about unintended and potentially deleterious impacts. The concept of "routine monitoring mechanisms" is introduced to explain this third finding. We conclude by considering the potential impact of this coverage on the subsequent development of the controversy.

This paper is an inquiry into how a new truth about sleepiness is being produced in a society increasingly organized around the primacy of expertise and its representation in print and visual media. Sleepiness originally described a benign, naturally occurring corporeal moment, a precursor to sleep. Increasingly, however, a new and disturbing meaning of somnolence is found in a juncture of medical and epidemiological research, social movements, and popular culture. Alongside the idea that sleepiness is a tranquil promise of repose is another, emerging truth. Sleepiness, we are told, is hazardous to self and others, and, importantly, it is each person's responsibility to resist this seductive call of the body. How, we ask, is a private, routinely occurring state of partial consciousness deprivatized, linked to public health vernaculars, and transformed into a reprobate condition? This alternative, disturbing truth about sleepiness is shown to be emerging from several disparate, seemingly unrelated caches of scientific studies, social movement literatures, magazines and newspapers, and web sites. The ideas of Michel Foucault, who pioneered the contemporary study of discourse, are shown to be particularly apropos to this inquiry, though not without some modification to make them more amenable to a contemporary society shaped increasingly by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.”

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The ecological-symbolic perspective posits that community response to toxic contarnination is shaped by both the nature of the environmental disruption and the interpretive frames through which those disruptions are apprehended. Full utilization of this perspective has been hampered by the deterministic underpinnings of the current chronic technological disaster model, which presents local conflict as a virtually inevitable outcome of these events. We draw upon the more contingent framing of the ecologicalsymbolic perspective to analyze the experiences of two communities that displayed consensual response patterns. We identify ecological and organizational factors that facilitated an interpretive framing of "limited danger".Complex problems associated with technological hazards have risen to increasing prominence in the decades since World War I1 (Cutter 1993). Such technically based disasters confront community residents with unprecedented dilemmas (Kroll-Smith, Couch, and Marshall 1997; Kroll-Smith 1995). Reflecting on the reactions to such crises, researchers have reported a convergence toward a community response pattern that William R. Freudenburg and Timothy R. Jones (1991) have labeled "the corrosive community" and that Kai Erikson (1994) has attributed to "a new species of trouble." Inherent in this second designation is the idea that toxic, contamination constitutes a disruption of biospheric processes profoundly different from anything that has preceded it in human history. In communities confronted by this "new trouble," the "ties that bind" neighbors, families, and friends become unglued, setting in motion a pattern of intracommunity conflict (Freudenburg 1997). ~ ~~~Direct all correspondences to Valerie Gunter,

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