Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Is ‘grassroots’ citizen science a front for big business?

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/essays/is-grassroots-cit...g-business

EXCERPT: [...] Prior to professionalisation in the 19th century, layman’s science was basically the only game in town. Nowadays, such folk are known as ‘citizen scientists’ – that is, ‘members of the general public who are participating in scientific research not as guinea pigs or funders, but by conducting experiments, making observations, collecting data, and engaging their minds to tasks beyond the reach of today’s best computers’ [...] For its champions [...] it’s nothing short of revolutionary.

[...] These arguments cluster around three main themes. In some cases, citizen science is touted as a remedy. In others, it’s a supercharger, energising the moribund mechanisms of mainstream science. Finally, it’s also seen as a means of uncorking the mighty powers of innovation, bottled up in academic labs and stifled by hoity-toity professors. [...]

But things lose their lustre when you look a little closer. [...] Indeed, the ‘citizen’ herself seems almost entirely absent from this crowded phalanx of bureaucratic programmes and entrepreneurial interventions, all united in their fervour to found a republic in which citizen science can flourish.

[...] What’s really behind the rise of citizen science? There are a few distinct trends and agendas at work. One is the obvious groundswell of hostility to experts spreading throughout the Western world. It rears its head in revanchist nationalism, the anti-vaccination movement, and global-warming denial.

[...] Secondly, the majority of existing citizen science consists of the public donating its unpaid work and data to privately owned, online entities that subsequently digest it as ‘big data’.

[...] Finally, citizen science is fuelled by the fact that the public sector is trying to get out of the science business. At least since the 1990s, many governments have been trying to shed responsibility for the funding and coordination of scientific research and training. Support for universities has been squeezed, offices of science policy have been shuttered, and research has been willingly palmed off to private sponsors. Governments no longer feel the necessity to produce and maintain a national cadre of highly-trained STEM workers.

Policymakers have been especially enamoured with citizen science because it appears to promise the next stage of outsourcing and divestment of their own prior research portfolio – now by farming work out to the ‘crowd’.

[...] Citizen science, I’d argue, is not structured to produce real knowledge. Rather, it’s about rejigging power relations. It draws strength from a certain brand of market fundamentalism – a political sensibility we might also call neoliberalism – in which people’s beliefs about science are simply transactions in a marketplace of ideas, as unassailable as their choice of soap-powder at the supermarket. What does it all mean? Let the market sort it out, not the scientific community. For neoliberals, the market knows the nature of truth better than any human being, a category which includes scientists.

The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t recognise that the mind must be prepared to see the significance of certain kinds of information. Being and becoming a scientist doesn’t revolve around a hieratic conformity to some transcendent ‘scientific method’. Rather, it’s the consequence of a long period of immersion in the specific culture of a discipline, such that one begins to be able to perceive what are the valid questions, preferred methods, legitimate styles of research, and so on. [...] By contrast, citizen science often amounts to the bald assertion that you can dispense with everything (including long years of education and apprenticeship) and mimic the outward trappings of science...

MORE: https://aeon.co/essays/is-grassroots-cit...g-business
Reply




Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)