Travelling Images for Policy Learning: Internet and Social Media as the Eye of the Public

Policy learning about complex policy problems can benefit from critical and opposing citizens, activists and NGO’s. Rather than attempting to educate this ‘ignorant’ public; ignoring them; or including these actors in participatory policy learning trajectories; their framings – both in words and images - of policy issues could be included as an important form of public accountability. In this paper, we build on the idea of an ‘ocular democracy’ in which the democratic value of candor is almost extorted by the ‘eyes of the people’ and can no longer be ignored (Green 2010). New technologies in combination with the global platforms of social media and internet, craft global ‘publics’. These publics engage in struggles about the meaning of policy issues, and yet are not location bound. Questions addressed are: 1) What mechanisms of imagination and travelling enable a movement of framed facts from one academic discipline to another, from the academic domain to the social and policy domain and back? 2) What is their influence –as the eye of the public - on governance strategies and decisions of national and transnational governing actors, such as governments, industry, academics and activists? Green, J. E. (2010) Eyes of the People: Democracy in an Age of Spectatorship, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Jasanoff, S. and S-H Kim (2013) Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies, Science as Culture , 22 (2), 189 – 196.