Public understanding of science and technology in the Internet era

Abstract

When this journal was launched in 1992, there was a growing consensus among political and academic leaders that a broad understanding of science and technology was necessary for economic prosperity and democratic governance. This was more of an intuitive judgment than an empirical one. After 30 years of data collection and analysis, it appears that these early expectations were largely correct, but the value of the last three decades of social and psychological research is that we now have a firmer empirical basis for these beliefs and expectations. This essay outlines the impact of the growth of science and technology and the development of new information technologies that have changed the ways that individuals obtain information. I will discuss the implications of these changes for democracy in the 21st century.

Just another clickbait title: A corpus-driven investigation of negative attitudes toward science on Reddit

“…Since the well-known “Bodmer report” was published in 1985 (Miller, 2001), large institutions across several continents have regularly surveyed their population’s attitudes toward science and science literacy (see Bauer and Falade, 2014: 141–143). Early research was interested in measuring the public’s knowledge of scientific facts (e.g.…”

“…A research agenda known as the public understanding of science (PUS) was mobilized in the late twentieth century to understand the public’s knowledge about and attitudes toward science (Sturgis and Allum, 2004). However, this agenda to “scientize” the public garnered mixed results (Miller, 2001: 116), and the traditional PUS model has been criticized for its deficiency view of the public and reliance on large-scale survey instruments (Sturgis and Allum, 2004: 59). Alternative methods adopted for PUS include more contextualized methods like case studies and interviews (e.g.…”

Looking back and looking ahead

“…The first two essays explore how two key issues of reasoning about PUS in the past 30 years—scientific literacy and science journalism—need to be adapted to the new realities of communication context and practical challenges. Jon D. Miller (2022), author of a launch perspective in the first issue of Public Understanding of Science , discusses in his essay how the concept of “scientific literacy,” on which he has spent much of his research effort, may still be useful in a decentralized communication environment with different ways to acquire knowledge and a lack of quality control. He writes that it would be unrealistic to expect all citizens to have full scientific literacy and emphasized the need to differentiate scientific literacy with respect to different fields and points to the democratic importance of attentive publics.…”

Metaphors as tools for understanding in science communication among experts and to the public

“…However, it can be a real challenge to make abstract scientific concepts and complicated mechanisms intelligible to laypeople. For a long time, it was assumed that the gap between expert and lay understanding of science was due to a knowledge deficit on the side of the general public: by simply providing more, or more detailed, information about science, the general public's so-called 'scientific literacy' would improve, or so it was believed (see Miller, 2001). Attempts to enhance scientific literacy based on this 'deficit model' failed, however, and this inspired the development of alternative, more sophisticated models of public understanding (Brossard & Lewenstein, 2009;Reincke et al, 2020).…”