Engaging With the Public? Assessing the Online Presence and Communication Practices of the Nanotechnology Industry

Abstract

This article examines whether the nanotechnology industry is engaging in the wider social debate surrounding it, through an analysis of its online communication practices. This is an important topic to study, given the nascent nature of the technology and the concerns among proponents to avoid the backlash biotech companies faced over genetically modified (GM) crops. Applying a new web crawling tool, the study captures and codes the hyperlinks of key nanotechnology companies according to their social and technical orientation, and status as producers, disseminators, and commercializers. The links are mapped and the prominence of social and technical issues is assessed. Finally, the home pages of sites are content analyzed to contextualize the presentation of the debate. The results show that although parts of the scientific community may have accepted the case for more engagement with the social aspects of nanotech, commercial developers are more reluctant to do so, at least based on their online presence.

Local Governance and the Online Networked Public Sphere—A Case Study

“…a semblance of socio-epistemic network between organisations" (Rogers & Marre, 2000, p. 145). Park, Thelwall, and Kluver (2005) and Ackland, Gibson, Lusoli, and Ward (2007) have identified a series of functions that hyperlinks may perform, such as information provision, network building, identity building, audience sharing, and message amplification. Such different interpretations of the function of hyperlinks have varied according to the methodological perspective of the researcher (Park & Thelwall, 2003).…”

The Web as History

“…what the author meant). Social scientific quantitative web content analysis will often involve latent content; for example Ackland et al (2010) conducted a principal components analysis of content from websites of organizations involved in nanotechnology (manufacturing, research, commercialization) and found three main discourses or orientations: an industrial or proactive discourse (focusing on business, investment and opportunity), a science or education discourse and a social or critical discourse (stressing health risks and the need for political discussion).…”

Web-Visions as Controversy-Lenses

“…The approach of 'webometric analysis' (WA) is close to that of SNA because it also promotes a macro-structural analysis of pre-defined social actors with fi gure 1 Visualization of communication structures in the debate about nanotechnology (Ackland et al 2010). predefined ties. Its position on the top of the vertical axis is unambiguous because it approaches the online as a source for saying something about the offline and interprets hyperlinks as representing a specific form of loose networking between organizations (Thellwall 2009).…”