Technoscience, policy and the new media. Nexus or vortex?

Abstract

Science, technology and policy are today entangled in concurrent crises, rapid transformations and conflicts, which are alimented by an ever-accelerating media system. Existing attempts to capture separate elements of crisis miss their structural coupling, and are hence ineffective. The crisis has elements of inevitability linked to our addiction to technology and communication. Using elementary concepts from social system theory, and reconnecting them to a long intellectual tradition of critique of technoscience, we argue that the relation between science and technoscience is where the analysis should start. Science's epistemic authority is simultaneously challenged and brought to bear of topics where it deeply interacts with technology and society, as we show by taking the vaccine controversy as a test case.