Full Report (PDF Format)

Introduction:

Making Sense of Emerging Technologies
Edna F. Einsiedel
University of Calgary

Emerging technologies can be described in a number of ways. These are technologies in the developmental stage of production, perhaps not yet fully exploited by firms. For many of these, basic research may still be taking place and the projections of potential applications remain just that – projected aspirations and hopes. When we look back to the histories of various technologies now embedded in society – from vaccines to computers, electricity to enhanced foods, we see historical trajectories that have led to numerous life and societal changes – from reduced mortality to revolutionized working conditions. These histories also remind us that once upon a time, these technologies may not always have been greeted with excitement and anticipation.

What is interesting about the introduction of new – and particularly revolutionary – technologies today is that societies, publics, and policy makers are in on the conversations much earlier in the developmental trajectories of new or emerging technologies. This is because of the ubiquity of information sources, the desire of governments to make a given technology “happen” (thus creating the conditions for such a happening to occur), the savvy of social groups in society or the attentive citizen.

Such attentiveness may also develop from experiences with older technologies, when controversies surrounded their introduction, led to their demise, or brought about a redesign more in keeping with public demands or interests.

In this report, we have chosen to investigate technologies that are in precommercialization or early commercialization stages. These happen to be nanotechnologies and biotechnologies. The latter, of course, has a longer evolutionary history but it consists of a range of applications in various commercialization stages. In this respect, the choices for our focus are somewhat arbitrary. On the other hand, these are “revolutionary” technologies. We do not use this word lightly. A technology is “revolutionary” when it has the capacity to change a wide range of sectors. Biotechnology has had impacts on what we eat and how our food is produced, how we view and treat disease, how we clean up the environment, even how we carry out justice in our judicial systems with DNA evidence. This wide-ranging set of implications and the nature of impacts makes for a “revolutionary” technology. Nanotechnology, still in its technological infancy, is similarly expected to have impacts on the types of materials we use and how they are applied, how we diagnose and treat disease, how we produce energy, and how we communicate.

Perhaps because of the impacts of these technologies, “everyone” has taken notice of them much earlier in the innovation process. “Everyone” includes the scientists working away on various aspects of the technology, the institutions these scientists belong to, the potential and actual venture capitalists ready to jump on “the next big (or small) thing”, the media who are alerted by early exciting prognostications, other stakeholders who see the potential benefits and the potential risks, and the publics who have become earlier voyeurs, watching the various aspects of the technology as these are being rolled out in fits and starts, or as claims and counterclaims are being made about them in public arenas.

In this collection of reports, we have focused on two specific “actors” in the landscape of emerging technologies: the first group are the publics who are going to be eventual users, who currently bankroll some of the research through their tax dollars, or who sometimes make decisions in the political sphere through the ballot box or through their choice of political decision-makers, or who may bear a greater burden of risks than others. The second set of actors are the media who highlight or ignore various technological developments, who “package” these developments in particular ways, who tell their stories through selection of certain voices.

The way publics have been viewed has changed over time. Perhaps the earliest way of envisioning ‘the public´ involved a unidimensional view of a monolithic public, subject to the vagaries of information disseminated from “the experts”. This simplistic view has changed significantly, with ‘publics´ (plural emphasis) engaged or inattentive at various times, occupying different roles at different times – citizen, consumer, patient, environmentalist -- being naïve or displaying expertise, becoming active or non-commital depending on context and circumstance. One important contextual difference has been identified in terms of the confluence of geography and culture, evident in transnational differences on biotechnology applications (Gaskell et al., 2001; Hallman, 2004)

What we have also learned is that other actors´ views of publics are also changing. While others have talked about publics as “a second hurdle” (Von Wartburg and Liew, 1999) after regulatory development, the increasing prominence given to publics today, if one is to go by public policy pronouncements, is less in terms of hurdle, more in terms of ‘participant´ in the technology development process.

Views of the media have also become more nuanced. The media are not just purveyors of what might be “news” or what they consider to be “newsworthy”; like publics, the media are disparate sets of voices performing a variety of roles (Einsiedel, 2005), channels of information, channels for hope and hype, extenders of scientific claims (Bubela and Caulfield, 2004), amplifiers of risk and controversy, and new venture marketers.

With this particular focus on publics and the media, we are also suggesting that a technology becomes emergent when it assumes its form in the public sphere – when others not necessarily involved in the technology´s direct development become privy to its gestation, most often and most directly through the media. This happens partly because scientific institutions (such as the leading journals or academic institutions) are linked even more directly to these popular channels, because scientists have become more strategic in their use of these popular channels, because the media are constantly on the look-out for stories that whet the public imagination, and because “life-enhancing” stories are continuing fodder for the public imaginations.

Given this context, the emergence of new technologies in the public arena is occurring much earlier in the innovation trajectory; many becoming a fixture in the public landscape even as early as the stage of “technology design”. In some ways, this may be occurring from the benefit of hindsight. That is, when we look back to the experience of “older” technologies – nuclear power, GM food are particular examples – we see that discussions of these technologies occurred at the commercialization stage when it was ‘too late´. Those engaged in nanotechnology design see this as a key lesson to be learned (see, for example, Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering, 2004).

The currency of these public conversations is hope – but hope is only meaningful in the context of fears; risks are meaningful only in the face of uncertainties. In this context, the set of reports presented here are early explorations of what these emerging technologies look like from the vantage point of representations among publics and the media. These are early impressions in some instances, longer-term and more developed views in others. We expect these pictures – snapshots at this point in time -- to similarly evolve with the technologies´ evolution. How these different interactions develop over time remains to be seen.

The contributors to this volume have had the benefit of long-standing collaborations. Our individual perspectives have been enriched by these cross-national comparisons and sharing of data. The current work has been made possible through the generosity and support of the Canadian Biotechnology Secretariat and Genome Canada support to the Genome Prairie GE3LS (Genomics, ethics, environmental, economic, legal and social studies) Project.