Controversy Mapping. Tommaso Venturini
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the methods used by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in counter-terrorism work.
This reaction demonstrates how actors can mistrust maps, but also strategically re-frame them (in this case, as evidence of organized persecution). Maps travel and lend themselves to being used in ways that were not always intended by their makers. They are, as James Corner remarks, “not prescriptive, but infinitely promising” (1999). Being unable to fully anticipate the consequences of our mapmaking reminds us of the impossibility of keeping our hands clean. The project to map wind energy controversies was funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research in a consortium that comprised industry partners as well as municipal developers. It was therefore reasonable to expect that any piece of research coming out of that project could be framed as partisan. And yet it is important not to confuse this situation with a resignation to doing the bidding of the wind industry. The overall objective of the project was to develop a more robust procedure for planning. In that context, doing controversy mapping meant insisting that those procedures should not misrepresent the concerns of wind energy opponents. Prior to the project, the narrative of both the wind industry and municipal developers had been that opposition was mainly coming from a small band of issue professionals, hopping from one turbine project to the next, stirring up public sentiment and orchestrating complaints. Against this narrative, the mapping revealed a large number of locally engaged actors sparked into being by a derailed public consultation or by the specifics of particular wind farm projects. According to the research, more than 81 percent of the opponents were exclusively engaged in online debates about one wind farm project. They were also the most active in the debate. Less than 2 percent were engaged in four debates or more and mostly in the same local area (Borch et al., 2020).
It is impossible to rule out the possibility that even a relatively modest intervention like compiling a list of influential opponents can be used to manipulate the debate. We cannot guarantee that our map, which ranked websites by visibility and categorized them by issue, could not be used to target adversaries in the wind energy debate more efficiently. Making the maps publicly available and being open about datasets and methods is thus a minimum requirement to ensure at least that all actors have a fair chance of interrogating the maps, if not to turn them to their advantage.
All protesters who shared the wind energy controversy maps understood that they were “on the radar,” but different groups reacted differently. Several messages circulated across the protest space: that opponents of wind energy had been spied upon; that research funding had been wasted on studying debates rather than the adverse effects of turbines; but also that the network of websites testified to the strength of the protest. In a press release, the European Platform Against Windfarms (EPAW) circulated one of the maps stating that “websites of wind power opponents worldwide will publish a graphic of the study […] to confirm their good networking and to show that one must reckon with them.” The press release also made it clear that the map could be expanded to include several missing protest groups – a suggestion that we willingly followed. What the example shows is that different actors turn controversy maps to their advantage in different ways, some of which can put the cartographer in a delicate situation.
Taking controversies seriously
As we have just seen, controversies can be inconvenient objects of study. The temptation is therefore strong to fall back on narratives that allow us to write them off or ignore them. These narratives come in two stereotypical versions that we could call the “corruption story” and the “deficit story.” Both presume a priori that technoscience would progress linearly if it was not derailed by cultural, economic, political, or otherwise extraneous factors. In the deficit story the public is in a state of ignorance because it lacks information (Wynne, 1991). Proponents of biotechnology, for example, often claim that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are disputed only because the public does not understand the mechanism of transgenesis and is therefore irrationally afraid of it. In the corruption story, on the other hand, contested knowledge is written off as mere pursuit of political or economic interests. Opponents of biotechnology often argue that GMOs are promoted, despite their technical flaws and social disadvantages, because of the financial interests of the corporations who manufacture them and the career interests of the scientists who are doing research on them. Hence, in the GMO debate, both sides can point to some sort of deviation from straight technoscientific progress and deny that there is any real controversy.
While neither of these explanations are completely off the mark, they certainly do not account exhaustively for controversies. After billions spent on science education over the past decades, it is hard to explain, for instance, that a large percentage of Americans still believe in strict creationism despite recurrent attempts to sway them to the theory of evolution (Newport, 2010). And even when science education does work, why should we expect the result to be citizens who are more willing to agree? Actors, however well informed, will often have stakes in a discussion and, as empirical evidence suggests, a better understanding of science can actually increase political polarization (Kahan, 2015; Kahan et al., 2017). As for deviation by corruption, it is worth keeping in mind that plenty of researchers in theoretical physics, formal mathematics, art history, sociolinguistics, and other disciplines keep stirring fierce controversies even though the political or economic interests are minimal.
The problem with deviation stories is that they reduce controversies to skirmishes at the fringes of technoscience, as if conflict could not arise within science and technology and as if technoscience could be easily separated from the rest of society. As we will show in the next chapters, none of these assumptions hold up under closer inspection. The proliferation of controversies has little to do with external interference and much to do with the role of science and technology in society. This is both good and bad news.
It is good news when the rise of controversies can be ascribed to growing demand for transparency. As technoscience grew ever more omnipresent and influential, it also became a topic of intense public interest and scrutiny and luckily so. The increased visibility of controversies could therefore be read optimistically as an increase in the democratization of science and technology, even when it comes with annoying side effects. Reflecting on the raging debates about vaccination, danah boyd notices that, despite their unfortunate consequences for public health, the arguments of those who oppose the vaccines still reflect a proactive attitude:
The more that the media focused on waving away these networks of parents through scientific language, the more the public felt sympathetic to the arguments being made by anti-vaxxers. Keep in mind that anti-vaxxers aren’t arguing that vaccinations definitively cause autism. They are arguing that we don’t know. They are arguing that experts are forcing children to be vaccinated against their will, which sounds like oppression. What they want is choice – the choice to not vaccinate. And they want information about the risks of vaccination, which they feel are not being given to them. In essence, they are doing what we taught them to do: questioning information sources and raising doubts about the incentives of those who are pushing a single message. (boyd, 2017)
The bad news is that controversies within science and technology could also derive from the growing efforts of lobbies and interest groups to stall political action through the artificial production of uncertainty and hence a deliberate pollution of public debate. First employed by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on the connection between smoking and cancer (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), this strategy of skepticism is now employed on issues like climate change, acid rain and ozone depletion – often by the same organizations (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). This type of strategic skepticism, which is also used by foreign intelligence agencies, amplifies disagreements among experts making the debate opaque and undermining public trust in institutions (Asmolov, 2018; Bennett & Livingston, 2018).
The investigation of controversies, however, is not only justified by the fact that they are increasingly difficult to ignore. Inconvenient as they may be, controversies are also excellent occasions to learn about the role of technoscience in social life. In the words of Bruno Latour:
I have stopped, in the engineering school where I teach, to give a social science class:
I only ask the young engineers to follow for