ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with way that nanosciences and nanotechnologies appear in public sphere. There has not been any public participation exercise arranged in Norway for nanotechnology and impression of author, as someone who lives in Norway and works with ethical and social aspects of nanotechnology, is that in general both public awareness and knowledge of nanotechnology is low. A Eurobarometer survey, conducted in 2005, asked inhabitants of European countries about interest in technologies. Attention and awareness of the advance of nanotechnology in various strands of social studies of science has overlapped in time with a matured discourse of extended participation in science and technology policy and decision-making. Words and expressions that drew attention forward in time, rather than to the present, such as robots, self-assembly and science-fiction were used more than 200 times. A small number of texts contrasted the dominant representation of control by presenting the possibility that society might completely lose control over new and powerful technologies.
