Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

How emerging technologies are communicated shapes public understanding, political decisions, and ultimately the futures we collectively choose (Borup et al. 2006). Yet little is known about how the people involved in this communication understand their own responsibility. Existing research has examined how communication shapes technology expectations and public perception, but the role of individual communicators' understandings and responsibility practices has received considerably less attention. This master's thesis analyses how communicators involved in public communication understand and enact responsibility. To do so, nuclear fusion is used as a case, since it combines high public expectations with significant technological uncertainty and environmental risk, and is relevant to global sustainability transitions. To investigate this, eight semi-structured interviews were conducted with communicators from different professional backgrounds, including science journalism, parliamentary technology assessment advisory, and institutional communication, all embedded in the German public discourse on nuclear fusion. The findings were grounded in Hans Jonas's concept of responsibility, the responsible research and innovation framework, and science communication. The findings suggest that the role understanding of the communicating person plays a crucial role in how they perceive and enact responsibility in their communication, with notable differences between science journalists and science communicators. It also became clear that there are three operational levels of responsibility: ethical, political, and practical. Responsible communication requires engagement at all three levels simultaneously. By focusing on democratic values, the findings also suggest that there is a risk of placing too much responsibility on one person, ignoring that, in a democratic process, all involved stakeholders, as well as the public, should be part of it. This requires communication practices that are transparent, inclusive, and distributed across all involved actors, rather than placed on individual communicators alone. Emerging technologies such as nuclear fusion carry implications not only for future energy systems but also for ecological and societal conditions across generations. Understanding them, therefore, requires not only technological expertise but also a critical examination of how they are communicated and who bears responsibility for that communication.