New World Wide Web (web) mapping techniques may inform and ultimately facilitate meaningful participation in current science and technology debates. The technique described here “landscapes” a debate by displaying key “webby” relationships between organizations. “Debate-scaping” plots two organizational positionings—the organizations' inter-hyperlinking as well as their discursive affinities. The underlying claim is that hyperlinking and discursive maps provide a semblance of given socio-epistemic networks on the web. The climate change debate on the web in November 1998 serves as a test case. Three findings are reported. First, distinctive .com, .gov and .org linking styles were found. Second, organizations take care in making hyperlinks, leading to the premise that the hyperlinks (and the “missing links”) reveal which issue and debate framings organizations acknowledge, and find acceptable and unacceptable. Finally, it was learned that organizations take substantive positions and address other organizations' positions. Thus, we found the makings of a “debate” that may be mapped. Scenarios of use to support new public participation techniques and experiments are discussed by way of conclusion.
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References
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The number of mouse clicks required to move from the opening pages to the organizations' link lists varied widely, but it was decided that if the link list was readily available, the jump from one organization to another could be called one jump. Many new organizations discussing climate change were reached in two jumps (four clicks), but that number dwindled with the third jump (generally the sixth click). It was decided to limit the set of actors in the debate, for the time being, to those actors (or actors” sites) within two jumps from the originally trusted organizations. Manual hyperlink mapping (on chalkboards with messy chalk and erasers) ensued, and organizational “geographies' were plotted and drawn. Others have called these “jumps”“degrees of separation.”
35.
and “Science” (information clearing houses); and http://www.panda.org/climate/Web.shtml.
36.
For the NGOs, Friends of the Earth presented the highest number of outgoing links and the most elaborate (hypertext) description of the debate. For the corporate component, Shell provided the most external links. In the case of the governmental organizations, UNFCCC offered the highest number of outgoing links.
37.
While there are several websites in the sample whose URL does not carry the suffix of one of the three groupings (Friends of the Earth, Shoeworld On-line Petition against Nike, Global Environmental Info Center, IPCC, UNFCCC, UNEP and WMO), these deviations can be traced back to differences between national policies of suffix allocation. This is not the case with the Global Climate Coalition and the International Energy Association, whose suffices do not deviate from the usual group suffices. Instead, these two organizations carry a suffix that places them in a grouping to which they only partly belong. For the purposes of analysis we place the UN organizations in the .gov grouping.
38.
Ronfeldtet al. , The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico, p.35, divide non-governmental organizations in NPOs (non-profit organizations), PVOs (private voluntary organizations) and GROs (grassroots organizations). According to the classification the following organizations do not belong to the NGO sector: IGOs (international governmental organizations), GONGOs (government-organised NGOs), GINGOs (government-inspired NGOs), and QUANGOs (quasi-NGOs).
39.
The RAND classification would place the GCC in the category of PVOs (private voluntary organizations), which are defined as part of the NGO sector. The classification does not exclude from the NGO world the non-profit organizations that represent the for-profit sector.
40.
In the “about GEIC” section, it is explained that the organization is “owned by the United Nations University and the Japan Environment Agency” and established to “better involve NGOs and other grassroots organizations in international and national environmental processes.”
41.
According to the RAND classification, the Global Environmental Info Center could be categorized as a GONGO (government-organized NGO) or as QUANGO (a quasi-NGO). Since the organization was founded in response to the UNCED process (and Agenda 21) in concert with NGOs, we prefer the QUANGO classification. GEIC is both a quasi-governmental organization and a quasi-non-governmental organization; yet its NGO-style web presence occasioned us to call it an .org.
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Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques 7, Pour en finir avec la tolerance (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1997).
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Noortje Marres , “The Debate on Climate Change on the World Wide Web: A Network Analysis,” unpublished ms., University of Amsterdam, 1998.
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Andrew Ross , The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, Nature's Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1994).
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Noortje Marres and Richard Rogers, “Depluralising the Web and Repluralising Public Debate: The Case of the GM Food Debate on the Web,” In Preferred Placement: Knowledge Politics on the Web, ed. Richard Rogers (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, 2000).
46.
With neo-pluralism, we refer to the changed conditions of pluralism on the web, as occasioned by the arrival on the web of dominant, “socially relevant” organizations mentioned in the introduction. More specifically, it refers to the acknowledgements across organizational groups (between .gov, .com and .org) currently being established on the web. Diametrically opposed to the “neo-pluralist gap” may be placed the “neo-pluralist potential”. Here the broadening of the scope of cross-group acknowledgements is highlighted as one of the future scenarios for the web.
47.
The average number of incoming links (average in-degree) for cross-group linkers (FoE, WWF, ECO, GEIC, UNEP, (UNFCCC), Shell, BP and GCC) is 3.9. It is 2.5 for the rest. The average number of links going out to group members (average out-degree to group members only) is 2.3 for cross-group linkers, and 1.3 for the rest.
48.
Michael Hauben and Ronda Hauben, Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet (Los Alamitos: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997). We define the exploitation of the possibilities of the web as a specific style, also because of the large number of websites that do not make use of this opportunity—a little less that two thirds of our sample. Our ideas about the cross-linking potential (the neo-pluralist, new media culture) contrast with the “virtual community” and “Netizen” school, which emphasizes linking between the like-minded, “sharing and caring” discussion lists and on-line community networks as defining the potential of web culture.
49.
See Patrice Riemens, “Don't Panic! Hack it!,” In Infowar, ed. Gerfried Stocker, and Christine Schöpf (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1998).
50.
and Roza Tsagarousianou, Damian Tambini and Cathy Brian, eds., Cyberdemocracy: Technologies, Cities and Civic Networks (London: Routledge, 1998).
51.
The IEA is another adherent of the communitarian linking style.
52.
Two other organizations in the sample engage in totem pole communications: the British Department of the Environment (.gov) and the Environmental Defence Fund (.org). They are the only organizations of their groups that do not link.
53.
Since BP's merger with Amoco, the company has returned to the totem pole style of communication.
54.
As it is formulated in the “about” sections of their websites.
55.
and Eveline Lubbers, “The Brent Spar Syndrome,”Read me, ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge, ed. Josephine Bosma, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert LovinkPauline van Mourik Broekmanet al., 281-285 (New York: Autonomedia, 1999).
56.
By “pinpointing” is meant simply that an organization may link to a specific part of another organization's site. By programming the activation of an outside site within the current site (as is increasingly done), the surfer could view the other party's site without leaving the original party's. This may be most acceptable to those organizations desiring their “frames” or framings to remain primary.
57.
Further case studies would test the generalization of the claims made in this paper.
