Comunicación pública de la tecnociencia: más allá de la difusión del conocimiento

Abstract

Public Communication of Technoscience (PCTS) is a complex activity and strongly dependent on the context. In spite of the fact that it includes a wide variety of contents, strategies, formats, values, intentions and functions, in the practice and in general, it has wanted to reduce it to a mere mechanism of linear transmission of genuine knowledge from a domain of authority (the scientific), who selects and spreads strategic contents, up to another domain of lay (the public), who receives the scientific information of an undifferentiated and passive way. This "dominant view" of PCTS not only has been generated, supported and managed by scientists and scientific institutions, but, especially and for mimetic effect, it has been reproduced by journalists and communicators of science.

This paper defends that the popularization of science is a political strategy for scientists and scientific institutions, and tries to reveal the basic purposes to practise it.