Millennial Experts
The Current Role of Citizens in Technical(ogical) Decision-Making
At a minimum, citizens have a duty to participate in the public debate over national S&T research and development priorities. Usually, this obligation is parlayed into voting and free speech rights. Certainly, the media and political groups urge individuals to take a personal interest and participate via social media in science policy debates, like climate change, medical interventions, evolution science education, and risk analysis. Recent news concerning Flint’s toxic water provides an ideal example of the role of the citizen scientist in uncovering widespread lead poisoning as the result of poor policy planning and a devastating technological decision.
Citizen Scientists
Citizen scientists participate in collaborative research projects by collecting data, anecdotal evidence, and non-expert analytical input. This “new again” has a relatively long history, dating back (at least) to the Christmas bird count coordinated by the Audubon around the turn of the 20th century. Toward the end of the century, Frank Fischer and others responded to the concerns of social scientists about environmental hazards and the “crisis of the professions” by advancing models of participatory research that attempted to encourage support for local knowledge and democratic empowerment. This was a top-down approach that situated the scientist in an advisory role to citizen — in opposition to the bottom-up form we see today, in which citizens provide data and other inputs to professional science projects.
Epstein’s treatment activists were so important to the “design, conduct, and interpretation” of AIDS therapy clinical trials that changed the culture of the National Institutes of Health by joining its advisory boards and challenging the fundamental boundary assumptions that had defined epidemiology research. These citizen scientists had a passionate interest in the swift development of a successful AIDS treatment, and pursued that interest with professional zeal: they mobilized their cultural capital; they coordinated their political support; they claimed vast policy territory by framing their special interest as both moral and scientifically feasible; and they advocated for a specific, pre-existing way forward.
The recent developments in Flint, Michigan illustrate the most recent way that we have come to understand citizen science model, in which private citizens collect data and report it to a research institution. Flint is a bit different, in that the data collection did not serve an existing research project, but rather provided the evidentiary impetus to launch an investigation. Still, the trend toward citizen participation in scientific research has an affect on decision-making in terms of project design, funding, and the expansion of feasible research and development projects that are made possible with mass input — former logistical restrictions on the scope and scale of data collection and analysis are rapidly falling away, and certain types of massive international research can be conducted by a small research team from a remote location. Furthermore, the trend is gaining popularity, as indicated by the growth of online markets that allow users to “shop” for participation opportunities in research projects. Other sites provide a crowdsourced funding platform for citizen scientists that wish to execute their own research project, by allowing investors to peruse research proposals and contribute to the project(s) of their choice.
Citizens Vs. Technocrats
As Fischer would have it, the technocrat class rose as a function of “policy scientists,” whose objective was to spread American democracy throughout the globe. While the technocracy may have served that objective, times have changed, and the idea of a rarified group of appointees sitting somewhat outside the chain of accountability seems quite at odds with the idea of the democratic process. Foucault’s work on the relationship between knowledge and power to impose social control provides an even more explicit caution against heavy reliance on technocrats in the determination of S&T policy.
Jasanoff compared the value of expert advisory committees to serve increasingly complex policy needs against the inherent limits of participatory decision-making in an attempt to determine whether the lay public could play a meaningful role in technological areas of policy decision, and concluded that the trend was away from transparency as the emphasis on diminishing controversy increased, but that the problem could be reconciled through negotiation of risk acceptance by stakeholders. Her recommendation, almost dismal in its pragmatism, nevertheless proved sound; a quarter-century later, it is the most common form of citizen input in science policy.
To wit, Daniel Sarewitz later recommended a hybrid participatory venue that would combine the Danish consensus conference with the Carnegie Foundation’s proposal for a National Forum on Science and Technology Goals. Neither the Carnegie Forum nor the Sarewitz hybrid (or the Danish model, for that matter) would find a foothold in American politics, however. At least one impediment to this style of citizen engagement involves the ontological organization of such an entity — in other words, who’s going to pay for it? Who would host it? Who would choose its membership? If it is funded by the government, then it’s just another bureaucratic institution; if it is funded by a non-profit, then it’s subject to the vagaries of the philanthropists who hold so much power that they can afford to give some of it away; and if it’s funded by private concerns, then it is unlikely to gain credibility due to the inherent conflicts of interest from corporate agendas.
Future Role of Citizens in Technical(ogical) Decision-Making
Citizens as Crowd-Sourced Experts
For at least four decades, STS scholarship has been demonstrating the theoretical and social value of citizen participation and lay expertise in research and policy decisions, but it wasn’t until very recently that Internet technology finally caught up with the literature. Crowd-sourced prediction markets tap into the wisdom of the crowds, the highly accurate special insight that can be gleaned from algorithms designed to capture confidence intervals from wide demographic swaths that have little more in common than an internet connection. Crowd sourcing is the top-down antecedent to Haraway’s situated knowledge, which is driven by the conditions and context specific to each individual, and which (perhaps ironically) provides the critical element of diversity that makes Bayesian networking models (i.e., crowdsourcing) such a powerful prediction tool. But crowdsourcing technology is not just evidence that STS theories of lay expertise are valid. Its implications are much more important and far reaching, because they prove that citizen participation in the scientific endeavor plays a fundamental role in its success.
Citizens as Big Data
Citizens don’t just collect and analyze data; they are data — big data. A massive amount of social network feedback informs policymakers and agencies how rules and regulations are perceived by way of “likes” and comment sections. Although much attention has been given to the commercial value of these data, any person with a Twitter account can follow almost every American elected official and government agency. These individuals and organizations track public response metrics in real-time, and then coordinate, craft, and tailor their messages accordingly. It is not at all uncommon to encounter slight variations of an announcement in a series of tweets over the course of a week (or even a day), and it seems reasonable to assume that this direct interaction between the public and the government has some kind of impact on policy decisions.
Sulston & Ferry hint at the future challenges and implications of gathering, processing, and storing genomic data for the entire human population, which was an early ambition of the Human Genome Project. Although the rather dystopian project to collect and catalogue our DNA never took flight (that we know of), the marketplace stepped in and found a way to get us to pay for the privilege of giving it away. Services to “find your heritage” by tracing your DNA to celebrities, known and unknown relatives — both living and dead, and even your anthropological origins are so popular that they have their own reality show. The Learning Channel’s Who Do You Think You Are?, sponsored by Ancestry.com, is but one example of this intensely personal participation in citizen science. Although Ancestry.com certainly must have some kind of legal right to store the DNA information it collects, its service would be of no value if it didn’t provide some degree of open source access to it.
Finally, the Internet of Things — that high-tech catchall for the stuff that we might forget to deliberately volunteer to our corporate overlords, such as our resting heart rate at every second of every day; our facial expressions as we watch television; the contents of our refrigerators; the number of times we turn on our bathroom light, and the duration that it is kept on (from which our bowel movement habits can be inferred) — puts an Orwellian, post-modern twist on the role of citizen science. As previously discussed, the position of that role has vacillated over the last 125 years, from volunteer (data-gatherer in the Audubon bird counts), to nuisance (Harold Lasswell’s policy science model), to project lead (Fischer’s participatory research model), to advisor (Sarewitz’s consensus-forum hybrid), to vigilant (Flint), to unit of data (or, perhaps more precisely, to producer of units of data). Viewed through a Foucaultian lens (or, a Panopticon, if you will), the changing role of the citizen scientist reveals her relative position within the prevailing power dynamic. As Table 1 illustrates, the citizen scientist is losing ground in the power structure.
However, this isn’t a call to Luddite reform. The citizen scientist can impose balance through awareness of the role its contribution (an approach Schön would approve of), and by actively opting into (or out of) that role and its obligations.
