ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how the new media, Internet driven social media, become part of the discursive and infrastructural analysis of risk. Providing an excellent theoretical and applied analysis of the precautionary principle, Maguire and Ellis emphasized how it is necessarily a concept that is examined, used, and contested discursively. One of the ways to conceptualize such density is by examining the network of nodes through which risk analysis passes from an originating point to where it can affect some end-user far from the original point of risk discussion. Based on one of the basic principles of risk communication, analysis of information sharing, in the US context, flows from two interconnected principles of legislation, regulation, and litigation: right to know and failure to warn. The argument against the public health damage of the asbestos industry gave rise to the principle that an industry is ethically and legally liable when it fails to warn victims of the health consequence of its products.
