Scientific Discourse- The Good, The Bad and The Public Sphere

The scientific genre is an interesting focus because it has so many different facets and possibilities. To the common person (including myself and many readers of this blog), unpacking scientific discourse may be a daunting task for the reason that we simply do not have knowledge of the highly technical jargon used in these papers and may not have the time to sort through thirty pages of a deeply causal scientific findings. Fear not, for there are different outlets available which have taken this task upon them- one of which being the omnipresent blog. Scientific blogs are significant in that they have the undoubtedly difficult task of taking highly scientific information and repurposing it to make it readable and relevant to an altered and broader audience. Furthermore, this requires the blogger (scientific bloggers are generally not scientists themselves) to transpose information gathered by others while making sure they present themselves as a credible source. One would think, as a public forum and agenda-setting agent, the blogger would strive to uphold the ideals of responsible scientific journalism- to Killingsworth and Palmer, describe a responsible scientific journalist as a journalist who is objective, informative, information/research focused, and representative (in some form) both sides of the argument.  While many scientific journals strive to uphold those principles and remain unbiased, bloggers, as ‘citizen journalists’, have much more leniency and decision in what subjects they cover and what slant is taken (Rettberg, 84). Time and time again, this freedom of press is used in a way that is deceptive or illegitimate- for example, taking information and utilizing diction in a way which limits the audience’s ability to decide how they feel about a situation. This situation is not ideal for the objective reader, but this misconstrued information is often imbibed and taken as truth. Why is that?

Enter Jonah Lehrer. As a scientific blogger, he has written articles on a myriad of subjects and for many different scientific websites. However, after years of gaining credibility and making scientific knowledge available to the average web browser, there was a shocking discovery; Lehrer had been plagiarizing himself numerous times, often using paragraph after paragraph of his already-published material in a brand new blog post. This made his large following take a step back and question Lehrer’s credibility… After all, how could information used in one context be correct in another, dissimilar context? Additionally, the readers of his blog posts were curious as to how they succumbed to his devious actions and incorrect information. In an effort not to discredit Lehrer’s audience, the blogger is incredibly talented at such plagiarism. When juxtaposed, his fraudulent efforts and statements not too dissimilar from those truthful and honest ones. I have taken one of his blog posts, titled “Out of the Blue” and looked at his use of narrative, recontextualization and stases in relation to the propagation of his potentially falsified or biased information.

As a disclaimer, I am not saying that Lehrer’s entire article is a falsity. I am simply looking at the different ways Lehrer utilized different rhetorical functions that would render his information biased or misrepresented. The article in question describes a man-made supercomputer which had been built to resemble the human brain, down to the 10,000 neurons and 30 million synaptic connections in a single neocortical column. While the information is fascinating, what really struck me was an apparent lack of Grant-Davie’s exigence. While I’m sure there is an audience which was thirsting for information on the blurring of the line between human and computer, the article does not take any measures to exhibit an apparent need for this information in the public sphere. I came to this realization that the article read like a well-articulated collection of facts about ‘the blue brain’, which are not utilized to direct the audience towards a greater purpose and/or are not attached to something that would directly affect the audience. A rhetorical situation which called this discourse into being is decidedly lacking and left unaddressed- This leads me to question the stases which are used and why. As I mentioned before, most of Lehrer’s post is comprised of facts and explanations of how ‘Blue Brain’ was built, meaning that a large part of the article stays in the first two stases (definition and cause). Fahnestock and Secor, in their text on Stases, conjecture that an audience who is appealed to within the first couple stases must value the inquiry at that level- meaning that the value of the information lies within itself.  This is true, when applied to the context of highly scientific and technical information; the definition of value shifts as a direct result of a shift to the public sphere. The audience no longer appears to be possible to value the information for science’s sake, and the public sphere needs something else in order to determine its value within their own lives. Leaving the article in the first two stases means that the audience has remained essentially the same and when questioning the legitimacy of the way Lehrer presents the information, the lack of exigence and external value make the information easy to plagarize, reuse, and recontextualize.  

Looking closely at Lehrer’s use of use of the English language, it is easy to notice how Lehrer used a combination of narrative and scientific jargon to compose what is read as a story. Much like how Killingsworth and Palmer described Time Magazine’s focus on the scientists rather than the research and information, Lehrer spotlights the scientist Henry Markram. In between descriptions of the intensity of the supercomputer, we learn of Markram’s frustration with the sheer amount of data and working with different scientists.  It even follows Markram as he contends with skeptics as well as his own failure.  The scientific information about the Blue Brain has been recontextualized and juxtaposed against vivid imagery and narrative, shaping the information into an article about the scientific process and the difficultly of science as an area of study. There is constant reference to Bazerman’s ‘intertext,’ mostly in the form of Markram’s personal anecdotes and the repetition of Markham’s titles. This focus on the personalities involved in the science (rather than the science itself) may bolster Lehrer’s credibility while acting as a scapegoat at the same time. Killingsworth and Palmer describe how the audience can form a community depending on who the text identifies with, and Lehrer makes it obvious that his aim is to align his audience with the scientific community. Because the focus is on Markram, Lehrer is able to word the information with any slant or convictions he wants without his credibility being questioned.

I would like to focus heavily on Killingsworth and Palmer's idea of the conventions for different genres when discussing Lehrer’s “Out of the Blue” piece as a whole. The text itself resembles the highly technical discourse from which it was written, but the contention between the cold facts of the Blue Brain and the warm arguments of Markram’s feat are ultimately public in essence. I believe that this information is misrepresented because Lehrer makes assumptions about his audience that are not necessarily true- as a result, he pulls the information in so many different directions that it is nearly impossible for the audience to make any logical opinions on it scientifically.  Whether or not the information is illegitimate is up for debate, but it is clear that Lehrer did not strive to lead his audience towards a clear and inherently-beneficial conclusion about the information which he presented. 

 Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles. “Intertextuality.” What Writing Does and How It Does It: And Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practice, Ed. Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. 83-96. 

Fahnestock, Jeanne and Marie Secor. "The Stases in Scientific and Literary Argument." Written Communication 5.4 (Oct 1988): 427-443.

Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” Rhetoric Review 15.2 (Spring 1997): 263-279. 

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, and Jacqueline S. Palmer. "Transformations of Scientific Discourse in the News Media." In Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U P, 1992. 133-160.

Lehrer, Jonah. "Out of the Blue." Seed Magazine. Seed Media Group, 3 March 2008. Web. 29 January 2013.

Rettberg, Jill Walker. Blogging. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2008. Excerpts from "What Is a Blog?", "Citizen Journalists," and "Blogging as Narrative." 4-30, 84-110, 111-126.