Envisioning nanotechnology: New media and future-oriented stakeholder dialogue

Nanotechnology promises to transform everyday life, yet there has been little reflection about the dilemmas, trade-offs and complex choices involved. Our project constructed a virtual public engagement platform in order to elucidate perspectives on multiple, plausible visions of human enhancement. Our new media platform operationalized open- source scenario planning to enable diverse communities to assess, critique and debate prospective nanotechnology-enabled products. Extending participation and deliberation through open-source mechanisms was an experiment involving not only an innovation of public engagement but also of traditional scenario planning. By revealing the NanoFutures project design and analysis, this paper explores to what extent this public engagement led to genuine dialogue and illustrates the risks and benefits of using multi-media tools in social science research.

[1]  A. Nordmann.  If and Then: A Critique of Speculative NanoEthics , 2007, The Ethics of Nanotechnology, Geoengineering and Clean Energy.

[2]  Lutz E. Schlange.  Scenarios: The art of strategic conversation , 1997 .

[3]  Inna Kouper,et al.  Conversations in the Blogosphere: An Analysis "From the Bottom Up" , 2005, Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

[4]  Alexandra Plows,et al.  Listening Without Prejudice? , 2007 .

[5]  H. M. Collins,et al.  The Third Wave of Science Studies , 2002, Science, Technology, and Society.

[6]  Steven C. Currall,et al.  What drives public acceptance of nanotechnology? , 2006, Nature nanotechnology.

[7]  Ira Bennett,et al.  Developing Plausible Nano-Enabled Products , 2008 .

[8]  G. Rowe,et al.  Public Participation Methods: A Framework for Evaluation , 2000 .

[9]  D. Collingridge.  The social control of technology , 1980 .

[10]  E. Kelly.  The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment , 1997 .

[11]  Bruce V. Lewenstein,et al.  Public Attitudes toward Emerging Technologies , 2005 .

[12]  A. de Moor,et al.  An argumentation analysis of weblog conversations , 2000 .

[13]  Brian Wynne,et al.  May the sheep safely graze? A reflexive view of the expert-lay knowledge divide. , 2004 .

[14]  Y BaldwinCarliss,et al.  The Architecture of Participation , 2006 .

[15]  Kevin J. Dooley,et al.  Centering Resonance Analysis: A Superior Data Mining Algorithm for Textual Data Streams , 2004 .

[16]  A. Irwin.  The Politics of Talk , 2006 .

[17]  Brian Wynne,et al.  Environmental Sociology: Theory and Practice@@@Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective@@@Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology , 1997 .

[18]  Cynthia Selin,et al.  Trust and the illusive force of scenarios , 2006 .

[19]  Matthew Kearnes,et al.  Nanotechnology, Governance, and Public Deliberation: What Role for the Social Sciences? , 2005 .

[20]  M. Lynch,et al.  The handbook of science and technology studies , 2008 .

[21]  M. Schreurs.  From the Bottom Up , 2008 .

[22]  Cynthia Selin,et al.  Negotiating Plausibility: Intervening in the Future of Nanotechnology , 2011, Sci. Eng. Ethics.

[23]  David H. Guston,et al.  Evaluating the First U.S. Consensus Conference: The Impact of the Citizens’ Panel on Telecommunications and the Future of Democracy , 1999 .

[24]  Jun'ichi Tatemura,et al.  Discovering Important Bloggers based on Analyzing Blog Threads , 2005 .

[25]  Andrew Keen,et al.  Book Review: Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. London and Boston, MA: Currency/Doubleday, 2007. 228 pp. ISBN 0—3855—2080—8, $22.95 (pbk) , 2008, New Media Soc..

[26]  Javier Lezaun.  Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge , 2005 .

[27]  David H. Guston,et al.  Real-time technology assessment , 2020, Emerging Technologies: Ethics, Law and Governance.

[28]  Patrick W. Hamlett,et al.  Technology Theory and Deliberative Democracy , 2003 .

[29]  Jerome R. Ravetz,et al.  Uncertainty and Quality in Science for Policy , 1990 .

[30]  Sheila Jasanoff,et al.  Handbook of Science and Technology Studies , 1995 .