The Shape of Public Engagement - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 133

8.1.4. From a “phantom public” to a “foam”
After describing the relationship between citizens and
experts and the role of controversies, Walter Lippmann
refers to the public as a phantom. He claims that the public
does not lead public life, as opposed to what the theory of
popular government implies, but that, on the contrary, it
remains a “phantom”, or the mere conjunction of “those
persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only
by supporting or opposing the actors” 7 . This image of the
public calls for the need to analyze its forms of organization.
If the public is a phantom, intangible and abstract, what
does its presence online when producing maps look like?
The connectivity of the Internet allows for a common
space of action to be created, i.e. for the “synchorization” of
online activities [BEA 12]. With the Fukushima controversy,
several Web users who wanted to map radiation used or
created communication platforms to help carrying out the
tasks necessary for producing user-friendly data. These
collaborative platforms can be analyzed through the concept
of “foam” [RIE 10]. This concept avoids going through three
other concepts that do not apply to the types of engagement
seen in the mapping of radiation, namely:
- The online community: this notion refers to a social
group sharing a set of values; it is very similar to individuals
involved in long-term relationships and is exemplified by the
notion of “virtual community” [RHE 00]. These
characteristics do not however reflect the type of
international cooperation among strangers that we have
discussed above about the work carried out on the radiation
data.
7 [LIP 27, p.77].