Words and figures of the public: The misunderstanding in scientific communication

Abstract

With the development of museums and centres of scientific and technological culture, research on their audiences and on visitors to exhibitions have multiplied. Studies of audiences' acceptance of science museums have long questioned the importance of prior scientific education, of the level of knowledge gained, of relative representations of a given subject, and of the visitor's familiarity with a particular area of science. However, there has never been any questioning of levels of knowledge of social, institutional and media models of communication, although that knowledge is constantly used by visitors. Visitors continue to give credit to science museums for being able to put them in contact with scientific spaces, even when a large part of what is being displayed evokes a space of advertising rhetoric and media communication. At the heart of popularization discourses and public debates about science and the different forms that its media coverage can take, the authors notice the recurring mobilization of an argument, or rather of a figure: that of the audience. They briefly present the three main forms this mobilization can take, show that public debate can itself be represented as a figure of discourse, and then draw out all the possible consequences of these invocations of the audience and question their meaning. © 2008 Springer Netherlands.