PreprintPDF Available

Stimulating Conversations about Human Germline Technology. A digital approach to societal debates

April 2020

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.15877.06886

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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Authors:

Roel Lutkenhaus

University of Twente

Jeroen Jansz

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Martine P. A. Bouman

Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet.

In recent years, experts have called for societal debates about human germline modification (HGM), a technology to edit heritable human genes. In this article, we argue that the Internet can be used to involve a large variety of societal stakeholders in societal debates about HGM. We illustrate our argument with a formative case study conducted for the Dutch DNA Dialogue – a societal debate about HGM in the Netherlands. Our results show that potential stakeholders can be found in unexpected places, and partnerships with websites and micro-celebrities should be forged to invite audiences to join the societal dialogue.

…

Related Video Network.

Note. The same network as Figure 7, but with node size expressing eigenvector centrality, expressing which videos are

most likely being referred to.

Communities

Human Germline Modification. The HGM community includes videos in English that are

mostly about how CRISPR-Cas9 technology can be applied to edit human genes. This community

is linked to and plays a central role in most of the communities in the recommender network.

Some of the videos are among the most watched in the network. However, as these videos are

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mostly in English and published by channels targeting international audiences, they are beyond

the scope of the project reported in this chapter.

Gentech. The Gentech community includes videos in Dutch that explain genetic

technology in a light way, while a smaller subset wields a more sensationalistic approach (i.e.,

conspiracy theories). Some videos are linked to the (international) HGM and Gentech & Fertility

communities. Being in Dutch, the videos are among the least-watched in the network. Within

this community, several videos have relatively high PageRank scores, meaning that they are most

likely referred to by other well-connected videos (Xing & Ghorbani, 2004). Potential collaboration

partners include (but are not limited to) the YouTube channels of various Dutch TV shows, a series

of biology classes for high school students, an online science magazine, a futurist/technologist

and public speaker, and the YouTube channels of a few newspapers.

Biotech Startups. The Biotech and Startups community includes videos in English about

biotech startups, such as show reels, reports, and short documentaries. This community is not

linked with the other communities in the network. Although this community does not include

Dutch channels, it includes an online magazine covering the European Biotech Industry as a

potential collaboration partner.

Fertility. The Fertility community includes videos in English about fertility treatments

such as IVF as well as video dairies by couples undergoing IVF. This community is not linked with

other communities in the network and its videos are among the most-watched and most-linked.

Without any Dutch channels, this community is beyond the scope of the project reported in this

chapter.

Gentech and Ethics. The Gentech and Ethics community includes videos in Dutch,

including speeches, reports, and short informational videos highlighting the ethical aspects of

genetic technology (e.g., the altering of human species). The videos are published by Dutch and

Belgian channels, and some videos are linked to the HGM community. Being in Dutch, the videos

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are not commonly watched and do not have high PageRank scores. Potential collaboration

partners include (but are not limited to) public speakers who specialize in science and society,

online science magazines, public speaking events, theatres, and public debate centers.

HGM, Popular Media & Conspiracy. The HGM, Popular Media & Conspiracy community

is a small cluster with videos in English about CRISPR-Cas9 technology, of which are loosely

connected to the (international) HGM and (Dutch) Gentech communities. Most videos are

characterized by a sensationalistic approach, lean toward conspiracy theories, and refer to

popular media (e.g., ‘gattaca’).

HGM and Ethics. The HGM and Ethics community is a cluster of videos in German about

CRISPR-Cas9 technology, of which some are connected to the HGM community. This community

does not include any Dutch channels.

Gentech & Fertility. The Gentech and Fertility community is a small cluster including

interviews with a Belgian member of the European Parliament. This community does not include

any Dutch channels.

Discussion

In this chapter, we explored online networks to find new avenues and potential

collaboration partners for a wide and inclusive societal debate on HGM in the Netherlands. Our

results include unexpected options for online collaborations as well as collaborations beyond the

Internet. Although we expected to find blogs, vlogs, and websites of micro-celebrities, our results

also include the websites; YouTube channels; as well as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook

accounts of health and public advocacy organizations, businesses, hospitals, libraries, and news

and science magazines. These comprehensive results could be explained by the fact that many of

these organizations, businesses, and institutions use multiple channels to represent themselves

in the virtual domain.

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Content formats and partnership arrangements

To collaborate with potential partners, the DDC must establish partnership arrangements

and develop media formats that stimulate the exchange of expertise and perspectives around

HGM. To shed light on a wide range of real-world perspectives, the consortium has studied real-

world scenarios that reflect risk and safety issues as well as ethical aspects of the prospective

application of HGM (van Baalen et al., 2019). This has resulted in several scenarios and

‘vignettes’, connecting real-world perspectives to expertise and providing angles to produce

media content as well as the organization of public discussion events.

In collaborations with micro-influencers, the scenarios and vignettes can serve as

dialogue starters—micro-celebrities may sketch or enact a scenario, share their views on its

implications, or ask audiences for their opinion, doubts, and questions (Lutkenhaus et al., 2019c).

Moreover, micro-celebrities may follow up on their audiences’ responses by sharing their views

on these opinions or by responding to doubt and questions, ideally in collaboration with topical

experts or other stakeholders in order to approach the topic from numerous angles.

To prevent the spread of misinformation, it is important to establish partnership

arrangements that enable the DDC to introduce topical expertise—either by double- checking for

factuality or prospectively providing briefing documents and source materials. Micro-celebrities

have built their social capital based on what their peers appreciate (Frobenius, 2014; Senft,

2009; Usher, 2018; Van Eldik et al., 2019); as such, they should be responsible for creating the

media content.

In addition to micro-celebrities and online magazines, our results included channels

spanning organizations, businesses, and institutions. Some point to or offer specific products,

events, and (public) services (e.g., online bookstores, science festivals, and reference works). From

a content strategy perspective, this offers various opportunities for content formats and

partnership arrangements.

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For example, in the Popular Media community, we identified web stores selling books,

music, and movies. Web stores seem unlikely collaboration partners in the organization of a

societal debate. However, if we see them as the digital equivalent of bookstores—also known to

frequently host public discussion events—web stores become interesting venues to extend the

DNA Dialogue. This can be achieved in various ways. For example, the web store might ‘tag’ their

books and movies about genetic technology and gather them on a ‘landing page’. When

customers search for books and movies about genetic technologies, they would be directed to this

page, from where the web store could provide links to digital extensions of the DNA Dialogue,

adding contextual entry points.

Additionally, the DDC could offer their expertise to the editors of each web store’s content

marketing teams managing their digital extensions (e.g., Facebook pages, YouTube channels, and

online magazines). This would enable the editors to write interesting features about, for example,

which fictional genetic technologies have become (or are about to become) reality, thereby

providing links to products in their web store and to digital extensions of the DNA Dialogue. In

doing so, the web store would position itself as a ‘hub of knowledge’, which is interesting from a

branding perspective, while also contributing to its corporate social responsibility profile. In these

ways, collaborations would not only use each collaborations partners channels to diffuse

information, but also strike a balance between the interests of the collaboration partners and the

objectives of the societal debate.

Similarly, the Popular Media community includes multiple online magazines about

cinema. In these magazines as well as their digital extensions, content formats can tap into the

public consciousness of cinema lovers by using movies or movie scenes about genetic technology

as conversation starters. For example, in a scene from Jurassic Park, Dr. Hammond, the park’s

owner, and Dr. Malcolm, a visiting scientist who Dr. Hammond wants to affiliate with the park,

have a fierce discussion about whether it was morally right to ‘resurrect dinosaurs’. Dr. Hammond

(“How can we stand in the light of science, and not act?”) and Dr. Malcolm (“You wield genetic

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power like a kid that has just found its dads gun”) represent two poles in the public debate about

HGM. Accordingly, the scene can be used to incite a debate on genetic modification among

cinema lovers.

On YouTube and Twitter, we found various micro-celebrities who wield a sensationalistic

tone, with a minority sharing myths or misinformation. It is easy to dismiss these micro-

celebrities as unreliable partners; yet in doing so, we would exclude their audiences—people

consuming their content on YouTube—from the DNA Dialogue. Instead, the DDC could approach

these micro-influencers and seek collaboration by offering its expertise to address myths and

misinformation or by affording channel owners the opportunity to interviews topical experts, in

which experts can respond to the channel owners’ doubts and questions.

Finally, offline collaborations might be needed to boost the salience of the DNA Dialogue

in some communities. For example, in the Theatre and Reference Work community, we found

performances and public discussion events on the website calendar pages of various theatres and

public libraries. This is an important insight in itself, as the consortium has not previously

considered organizing performances or public discussion events with theatres. Moreover, by

doing so, it is likely the DNA Dialogue becomes more prominent in this community through

calendar pages as well as digital extensions of theatres and public libraries.

Methodological limitations

Building in room for reflexivity allowed us to adapt to the circumstances, ultimately

providing insights that mattered most to the DDC. During the process, several issues emerged

that may require attention in future research.

First, our goal was to identify websites, micro-celebrities, and other potential

collaboration partners in online networks using a comprehensive list of key phrases. During the

earliest phase of this study, the members of the DDC were asked to share ideas for themes, topics,

and angles that ultimately led to our list of keywords and phrases. However, by creating a list of

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key phrases ourselves, we only searched in areas that the DDC was already aware of, and the

resulting media content may have only spanned a small part of all possible real-world views and

associations.

The Rathenau Institute, also part of the DDC, studied real-world scenarios that reflect

risk and safety issues as well as ethical aspects of the prospective application of HGM (van Baalen

et al., 2019). This report became available a few weeks after we presented our final results to the

DDC , and, in retrospect, provides additional input for the list of keywords and phrases. For future

societal debates, we recommend to thoroughly study the real-world scenarios associated with

the debate’s topic before generating the keywords and phrases.

Second, by using Google Search for key phrases, we strongly relied on their search

algorithm—even though we disabled personalization, safe search, and searched from an IP

address with no search history. Nonetheless, Google is commonly used by a large majority of

Dutch Internet users, and thereby provides a shared interface to navigate the Internet. In our

study, we approached these search results as a snapshot of this common interface, being aware

that the results might vary due to algorithmic personalization and the high level of activity in the

networks. Especially for formative studies (Bouman, 1999), we believe this snapshot is

meaningful as it represents how the Internet actually looks to its end users.

Third, we used a condensed list of key phrases to search for content on Twitter and

YouTube. For each theme and level, we selected the key phrases for which Google returned the

most relevant results. Consequently, the results from Twitter and YouTube appeared to be equally

relevant and did not require us to do any manual filtering. This addressed an important problem,

as there was no time to manually filter three separate data sets with the media strategist waiting

for our inputs. However, a narrower set of keywords may have led to a smaller set of results.

Lastly, links between web pages do not always signify meaningful pathways of

information but can also be used as a tactic to boost web pages’ significance in Google’s search

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results. This practice is called “link building” (Moogan, 2020), and it is likely that the issue

network includes noise as a result. We have aimed to diminish the noise by filtering nodes with a

small number of connections—a rather crude approach. Future researchers could explore the

practical use of various filtering approaches (Waldherr et al., 2017).

Conclusion

In recent years, experts have called for societal debates about HGM. Societal debates such as the

Dutch DNA Dialogue do not aim to reach unequivocal societal agreement on specific

implementations; rather, they aim to propel the exchange of expertise and a wide range of

stakeholder perspectives. As such, the DNA Dialogue could enhance the conditions for informed,

widely supported consensus decisions that can be implemented through quality standards and

legislation.

Currently, new media platforms can be used to extend the scope of societal debates by

reaching out to online communities and to create interactive media formats that enable and

invite audiences to engage with each other on the topic of HGM. To achieve this, there is a crucial

role to be played by media strategies. Our case study provides insights and suggestions for the

media strategy of the Dutch DNA Dialogue, helping to widen and deepen the societal debate in

three specific ways: (a) we identified online communities as avenues for public dialogues, often

beyond the reach of traditional mass media; (b) our results contribute to a deeper understanding

of how communities relate to HGM, helping the DDC to tailor media formats to their preferences;

and (c) we provide a wide variety of potential collaboration partners such as micro-celebrities,

magazines, web stores, fan communities, and reference works.

This chapter shows that formative analysis of online networks around socio-

technological issues is relevant, important, and ready to be applied in future societal debates.

This is especially evident nowadays, as the organization of societal debates seems to fit within a

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larger trend of public engagement, playing an integral part in innovation trajectories in Europe,

Australia, and North America (Fisher et al., 2015).

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Jun 2019

In a world of continuous migration, super-diverse cities consist of a multitude of migrants and non-migrants from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Yet one characteristic they all have in common is the place where they currently live. In addition, both groups are active users of social media, especially the young. Social media provide platforms to construct and negotiate one’s identity—particularly the identity related to where one lives: urban identity. This article presents the results of a survey study (N = 324) investigating the relationships between social media engagement and identity construction among migrant and non-migrant adolescents in the super-diverse city of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was found that urban identity was significantly higher for migrants than non-migrants. Certain aspects of social media engagement predicted urban identity in combination with social identity. Finally, social media engagement was found to be positively related to group self-esteem.

Tailoring in the digital era: Stimulating dialogues on health topics in collaboration with social media influencers

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2019

In today’s media landscape, audiences increasingly turn to online communities for media consumption and to exchange information about specific niche interests such as health-related topics. This calls for a segmented approach in which interventions are targeted at online communities, tailored to their specific cultures and health-related perceptions, and leverage the dynamics of conversation and social influence in online networks. Strategies drawn from the field of influencer marketing provide interesting opportunities to reach and engage with audiences in a personally relevant manner, including with those who may disagree with an intervention’s message. This article reflects on what health communicators might learn from influencer strategies and proposes digital methods to target and tailor health communication in the digital era. More concretely, we present methods to: (a) identify online communities engaging on a specific health issue; (b) map community specific cultures and health-related perceptions; and (c) identify influencers as potential collaboration partners. As such, we adopt a slightly different take on tailoring by putting the creative and cultural competences of social influencers central, and by aligning our methods with a media mapping protocol to create influencer strategies that are tailored to the cultures and health-related perceptions of multiple online audience segments. We illustrate the potential of these methods with a study of how vaccination is discussed among Dutch Twitter users.

Networks of Audience Overlap in the Consumption of Digital News

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2018

How do people consume news online? Here, we propose a novel way to answer this question using the browsing behavior of web users and the networks they form while navigating news content. In these networks, two news outlets are connected if they share a fraction of their audiences. We propose two crucial improvements to the methodology employed in previous research: a statistical test to filter out non-significant overlap between sites; and a thresholding approach to identify the core of the audience network. We explain why our approach is better than previous approaches using two data sets: one tracks digital news consumption during the 2016 Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the other during the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. We show that our filtering technique produces a completely different ranking of top sites, uncovering structural properties in the audience network that would go unnoticed otherwise.

From ranking algorithms to ‘ranking cultures’: Investigating the modulation of visibility in YouTube search results

Article

Full-text available

Feb 2018

Algorithms, as constitutive elements of online platforms, are increasingly shaping everyday sociability. Developing suitable empirical approaches to render them accountable and to study their social power has become a prominent scholarly concern. This article proposes an approach to examine what an algorithm does, not only to move closer to understanding how it works, but also to investigate broader forms of agency involved. To do this, we examine YouTube’s search results ranking over time in the context of seven sociocultural issues. Through a combination of rank visualizations, computational change metrics and qualitative analysis, we study search ranking as the distributed accomplishment of ‘ranking cultures’. First, we identify three forms of ordering over time – stable, ‘newsy’ and mixed rank morphologies. Second, we observe that rankings cannot be easily linked back to popularity metrics, which highlights the role of platform features such as channel subscriptions in processes of visibility distribution. Third, we find that the contents appearing in the top 20 results are heavily influenced by both issue and platform vernaculars. YouTube-native content, which often thrives on controversy and dissent, systematically beats out mainstream actors in terms of exposure. We close by arguing that ranking cultures are embedded in the meshes of mutually constitutive agencies that frustrate our attempts at causal explanation and are better served by strategies of ‘descriptive assemblage’.

Ten ways in which He Jiankui violated ethics

Article

Jan 2019

Sheldon Krimsky

Shock greets claim of CRISPR-edited babies

Article

Nov 2018

Dennis Normile

Apparent germline engineering by Chinese researcher prompts outrage and investigations.

Rethinking microcelebrity: key points in practice, performance and purpose

Article

Nov 2018

Bethany Usher

Since Terri Senft coined the term ‘microcelebrity’ a decade ago, it has become a key focus for studies of digital celebrity, describing both the ‘bottom up’ production practices of potentially billions of ‘ordinary’ people on social networks sites, and a new category for the famous. Through statistical and qualitative examination of the practices and reach of the top 20 ‘digital first talents’ represented by UK-based agency Gleam Futures and then focused analysis of the Instagram accounts of power couple Zoe Sugg and Alfie Deyes, this article offers three key ways we might ‘rethink’ microcelebrity. Firstly, that what began as a ‘prosumer’ activity in the 2000s is now a professionalised and commercialised group production practice and while microcelebrities are portrayed as symbols of individualised emancipation – building fame on their own terms and challenging the cultural hegemony of corporate media – they now work within the mainstream. Secondly, how performances across social media create sophisticated ‘repressive ambiences’ for audiences, which perpetuate consumerism as liberation through deliberately fostering parasociality with audiences and directives to emulate. Finally, how this follows similar ‘networked’ displays of other reality-based celebrities and argues for the inclusion of the term ‘applied’ celebrity as a means to understand their practices, performances and purposes.

Narrative Networks: Storied Approaches in a Digital Age

Book

Jan 2015

Brian Alleyne

Stimulating Conversations about Human Germline Technology. A digital approach to societal debates

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