KeikoXK.Co. ...and blogs

At the end of chapter five, Fortun relates a joke told by Kári: "Keiko is my offensive linesman [...] running interference for me. He's keeping me out of the papers for a while." (64) It's not until chapter eight that Keiko is examined in depth, but thoughout the chapter Fortun makes an increasingly strong case concerning the "KeikoXK.Co." chiasmus. The two are folded into each other.

What strikes me about the story of Keiko -- and by extension, the story of K.Co. -- is the technological state of the media during this particular period. I remember watching Free Willy and Free Willy 2 as a child, and I remember being vaguely aware of Keiko's trip "home". I do not, however, have a meaningful grasp of how the media that covered these events must have functioned -- i.e. without widespread camera phones, without blogs, and so on. It seems strange to me to think of turning to only a few sources for my daily news.

But the story of Keiko and K.Co. is placed before the widespread use of these news technologies, and this is evidenced with particular strength in Kári's joke about Keiko's "interference". The implication is, of course, that the media as a whole cannot focus on more than a single subject at a time; the news is (at least topically) hegemonic. This is a story from a time when the media was a whole -- not fractured.

I wonder, then, if the same kinds of promises and the same kinds of promissory rhetoric could be employed in the age of the blog. Now certainly, the media -- even grassroots media -- is fairly single minded, but it is hard to imagine a complete lack of critical Icelandic bloggers. It is hard to imagine no one sitting in front of a screen in a dark room, blogging away about the evils of deCode. If the media is fractured, surely some would keep their focus on Kári rather than Keiko?

This is, of course, all speculation; there is no way to know if a change in media configuration would have drastically altered the events documented in Promising Genomics. Still, I think it important to note that it is not only the rapidity of change in genomics that is relevant to its practice, but also the rapidity of change in the wider technological world that is relevant. New technologies, or the new use of technologies, may substantially change one of the "rings" of Model 2, which in turn may substantially change genomics.

I guess this means that to truly grasp genomics, our view must be very broad.

scienceXrhetoric

Over the last week and a half, much of our discussion has revolved around the difference between two models of scientific practice (depicted on the left). The movement from Model 1 to Model 2 is fundamentally one of destabilization, in that the rigid systems and hierarchies of Model 1 are replaced with the interrelated actors of Model 2, each of which contribute to the formation and movement of the others.

What I find most interesting about this shift -- this act of destabilization -- is that the second model includes an ethical critique and demand that is not present (or perhaps is present, but hidden) in the first model. Model 2 places research practices, academic disciplines, political institutions, and media outlets in mutually influential relation to one another. Thus, any change in one area effects a change in another. Or, to take it further, any perceived change in one area effects change in another. It is this element of perception (which is closely linked to the subjectivity of the promise) that includes the ethical critiqueXdemand: Scientists should not only be concerned with the ethics of their methological practice, but also with the ethics of their rhetorical practice. In other words, how they speak (whether amongst themselves, or to Congress, or to the public, etc.) is as important as what they do, precisely because it is the subjectivity of perception that drives the system, rather than the concrete accumulation of facts. It is for this reason that the truly important moment for the Human Genome Project was the press conference announcing the project's completion, rather than the actual completion of the project itself, which, in Collins' case, came somewhat later (Zwart, 370-371).

But what does this mean for the future of genomics? Any rhetorical move implies the existence of competing discourses. With this in mind, it seems safe to assert that the current state of affairs in genomics -- laden with rhetoric as it is -- is a myriad of competing discourses. But isn't the progression of science from complicated uncertainty to black-box, textbook-style facts itself dependent on the establishment of a hegemonic discourse in which (explicit) rhetorical moves play less and less of a role? If anything, the rapid progress of genomics research has only multiplied the range of discourses present at any one particular time, thus moving genomics even further from the hegemony necessary to pin down "facts" methodologically and rhetorically -- and consequently, further into territory in which the scientist is responsible not only for what he or she does, but what he or she says (and how he or she says it). The future is, of course, up for grabs, but if current trends continue it seems that the outcome may be an expression of science radically different than that of the traditional textbook-dissemination model.