Mikihito Tanaka, Waseda University;
Noel Kikuchi, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies;
Daisuke Yoshinaga, Waseda University;
Ken Kawamura, Seijo University;
Go Yoshizawa, Oslo Metropolitan University;
Ryuma Shineha, Seijo Univerisity
New Orleans 2019: Conversing
Vaccination, Climate change or Artificial Intelligence — World aparting throughout the emerging scientific arguments. In Japan, the tendency became salient after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. During the chaos after the disaster, one of the problems was the silence of the experts. On facing the devastating hazard and uncertain situation, they hesitated to speak out individually to the public and only tried to make the ‘unified voice’ from the institutions or academies. On the other hand, numbers of scientists were discussing on the anonymous bulletin board system (BBS). Also, journalists tried to gather experts’ comments, but the experts became in forward in such situation were a mixture of wheat and chaff. These tendencies brought the crisis of credibility of experts in Japan.
With reflections on the experiences above, we propose newly designed classical BBS to provide a public arena for scientific arguments. After log-in to the BBS, experts could comment on various types of topics anonymously. System warrants that every contributor in the discussion on BBS is some kinds of expert (from natural scientists to STS scholars). However, the debate is translucent to the public, and journalists can contact the anonymous commentators from backdoor for further interview.