Developments in nanotechnology are attracting the attention of scholars of science communication who can play a strategic role in understanding technology adoption by the public. This paper begins to address a critical gap in that research by studying the impact of visual images on lay American audience associations with nanotechnology. An inductive qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews about participants' general knowledge of nanotechnology and their reactions to two different visual images of nanotechnology revealed 10 themes, which were sometimes valenced positively or negatively: science, (medicinal) machines, technology, very small, sky, motion, (childhood) toys, bodily blood, injecting (disease), and foreign (insect). We argue that these findings illustrate a specific “visual” domain of “science” images, that this domain is organized to contain polarities, and that this leads to volatility in public attitudes but also flexibility in responses to a range of visual images of new sciences such as nanotechnology.
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