Authority and Expertise in New Sites of Knowledge Production

This chapter examines how the creation of knowledge, as a form of cultural production and consumption, has been reshaped by new media practices. Much has been written recently about how user-generated content enters and reshapes circulatory matrices of media and power, and about how new media practices redefine the role of cultural producers (Jenkins 2006; Bruns 2008). For example, platforms like Flickr have been hailed as sites of new literacies and creativities, while blogs have been implicated in debates about how new dynamics around information and news production are reshaping the public sphere as a pillar of democracy. Much attention has been awarded to fields such as journalism, the creative industries and politics, but the ways in which new media practices are mediated through and inflected by the often highly institutionalized contexts of scientific research is left unaddressed. Investigating this becomes particularly important in an era in which lay-experts become increasingly visible and in which researchers are expected to develop relations beyond the university walls.