Abstract
Strands of research within Internet studies and the social sciences have over the last decade analyzed and discussed the characteristics of the Internet as a public sphere. These studies have differed in their final evaluations but many of them have shared the approach of talking about an ‘online public sphere’ that can be compared to its offine counterpart. This paper challenges this divide by pointing out differences in the way Wikipedia.com and Google.co.uk each demarcated the controversy about synthetic biology from January to June 2011. It is argued that differences in the philosophy of information-filtering and the network of actors that influence the final demarcations is the central divide to look at when posing questions about the mediation of controversies and the paper introduces the concept of ‘web-visions’ as an alternative to taking about an ‘online public sphere’. Web-visions are operationalized as the hyperlink-networks a given information-filter gives its user access to and it is emphazised how these visions are shaped by human as well as non-human actors. The analysis shows how Google.co.uk provides more fluid visions than Wikipedia as well as how this fluidity is correlated with the publication of a report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. The analysis furthermore provides the basis for discussing the relevance of looking at ‘web- visions’ when trying to understand controversies and their mediation.
Highlights
Debates about whether the Internet provides a valuable public sphere have been reoccurring since the mid-90s and they have often centered around differences and similarities between the so-called “online public sphere” and its offline counterpart
It will be argued that conceptualizations that posit the online sphere as a unified phenomenon capable of being compared to other spheres are increasingly challenged by the role which informationfilters and their surrounding networks play in organizing the visibility of voices around specific issues (Halavais 2009)
The third answer to the question of relevance is broader and it points to the fact that these visions are assemblages that are influenced by a range of different phenomena such as algorithms and information-filters, cultures of relevance, cultures of media use and – most importantly – digital traces left by the organizations involved in the controversy of synthetic biology
Summary
Debates about whether the Internet provides a valuable public sphere have been reoccurring since the mid-90s and they have often centered around differences and similarities between the so-called “online public sphere” and its offline counterpart. The data presented in the paper represents the beginning of a longer longitudinal design and it should be read as an explorative attempt at using the dynamics of these situated “web-visions” to conceptualize the relation between the web and sociotechnical controversies in a way that is different than working from the basis of samples of web-sites as more or less accurate representations of an online sphere. Co.uk gives rise to more fluid demarcations of the issues of synthetic biology than wikipedia.com and how e.g. artists are visible as voicing social and ethical questions about the technology in the Google-vision This stands in contrast to the more stable and institutionalized demarcation emerging from wikipedia.com but the longitudinal study shows how the web-visions get more and more similar over time.
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