Between Infotainment and Citizen Science: Degrees of Intended Non-expert Participation Through Knowledge Communication

Abstract

An important part of scientific communication nowadays is to communicate backgrounds and results of research to the interested public and to other researchers, following the general principle of ‘open science’. The part of such scientific communication oriented towards the general public is often interchangeably called, for instance, popularisation, democratisation or dissemination, to mention some of the frequent denominations. In this conceptual chapter, a continuum of categories is proposed for this type of scientific communication intended to insert some relevant differentiations. Following a knowledge communication approach with a focus on knowledge asymmetries between senders and receivers, the proposed principle is that of level of participatory ambition, that is, to what extent the researcher wants to construct the knowledge asymmetry as one allowing the non-expert to participate in the knowledge generation or not. The four-stage continuum reaches from infotainment over dissemination and popularisation to citizen science as the knowledge communication type with the highest degree of participatory ambition. The continuum is intended to be used as a basis for linguistic studies of the ways the different level of participatory ambition is affecting text formulation.