ABSTRACT
The rise of what has been called Web 2.0, ‘a second generation of the Web that allows people to produce and debate information online’ (Brossard and Scheufele 2013, 41), has brought sweeping changes to the landscape of communication with new features of hypertextuality, multimodality, interactivity, and accessibility (Deuze 2003). Science communication has been included in this shift ushering in the era of ‘Science 2.0’ (Lievrouw 2010). Like Web 2.0, Science 2.0 is a sphere where science information is partly user-generated content and is shared by users via social media dialogs, with the need for the scientific community to connect with the public in new ways. Science communication is no longer a matter of transmitting authoritative knowledge from the science community to an uninformed public, but includes dialogs that involve different levels of specialists, institutions, and organizations via platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (Brossard 2013). There has, Lievrouw (2010) suggests, been a shift from ‘big science’ dominated by information provided by wealthy institutions, massmarketed on a global scale to ‘little science’, which is something much more localized, specialized, and personalized. However, little is known about this process and there is
urgency for scholarly attention (Allan 2009; Brossard and Scheufele 2013; Lievrouw 2010).
