TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 985 functionalist in their reliance on consensus and elite expertise. The postscript to the book, which focuses on science as expertise, clearly indicates this theoretical commitment. Collins portrays scientific work as composed of relatively closed professional worlds: “Professional scientists are the experts to whom we must turn when we want to know about the natural world. Science, however, is not a profession that can take from our shoulders the burden of political, legal, moral and technological decision-making. It can only offer the best advice that there is to be had. To ask for more than this is to risk widespread disillusion with science, with all its devastating consequences.” This statement is set in the context of a defense of the human fallibility of scientific knowledge—with which, as a radically relativist sociologist of science, I fully agree. However, I believe that relativism is not to be found in multiple, closed systems nor in the adjudicatory mecha nisms of professional consensus. Rather, it is contained in the fun damentally open, deeply heterogeneous nature ofeverything. A really radical relativism would carry Collins’s original and ground-breaking work on replication beyond a demonstration of normative variability and into a dynamic examination of plural epistemologies. Susan Leigh Star Dr. Star is assistant professor of information and computer science and sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and director of research methods at Tremont Research Institute. Her most recent work is Regions of the Mind: British Brain Research, 1870—1906 (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Selling Science: How the Press Covers Science and Technology. By Dorothy Nelkin. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1987. Pp. xiii + 224; notes, in dex. $16.95. Sociologist Dorothy Nelkin’s analysis of science journalism will be especially useful to those for whom this topic is new or of only casual interest. Written cogently and clearly, Nelkin’s most important addi tion to existing literature is a survey of the images of science and technology used by the press. Using examples such as computers, biotechnology, and sociobiology, she shows that scientists are generally idealized as sources of authority, as heroes, as seekers after pure truth. The “technological frontier” is a common image, Nelkin argues, with frontier and military metaphors substituting for informed discussion of the social issues posed by new technologies. After a brief attack on the often-neglected question of whether we should worry about how science and technology are treated in the media, Nelkin goes on to detail the constraints on journalists, espe cially science journalists. In her only historical section, she identifies the missionary culture of professional science journalism developed during the 20th century. Other important constraints include the norm of objectivity, the pressures of producing news reports on daily dead 986 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE lines, the “gatekeeping” exercised by editors, the economic pressures imposed by advertisers, and the vulnerability of reporters to limited sources of information. Though Nelkin has done some original re search here, she also draws heavily on the work of others. This is not a bad thing. The literature has been scattered and fragmented, and Nelkin does a valuable service in collecting it and giving it coherence. Finally, Nelkin discusses how scientists and especially technological companies manipulate science news for their own personal or insti tutional needs. She devotes a lengthy section to the “strategies of control” used by scientists, identifying the tension between wanting to be covered and wanting to control the terms of that coverage. Although valuable, Nelkin’s work here is already being supplemented by newer historical studies providing greater detail and subtlety. Despite the book’s strengths, historians generally will be disap pointed at the lack of historical perspective and documentation. His torians of technology in particular will regret the lack of precision in her distinctions between science and technology—although, in her defense, this is a distinction the press rarely, if ever, makes. But the big question that Nelkin fails to address is why, after fortyfive years of explicit concern with public understanding of science, the scientific, technical, and journalism communities continue to ask the same questions—and provide the same answers. Yes, the public ought to know more than idealized...
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Nov 1, 1990
Karen A Frenkel 
Open Access
