Sunday, February 18, 2024

Dark Citizen Science

 

Citizen science is often celebrated. We interrogate this position through exploration of socio-technoscientific phenomena that mirror citizen science yet are dis-aligned with its ideals. We term this ‘Dark Citizen Science’. We identify five conceptual dimensions of citizen science – purpose, process, perceptibility, power and public effect. Dark citizen science mirrors traditional citizen science in purpose and process but diverges in perceptibility, power and public effect. We compare two Internet-based categorization processes, Citizen Science project Galaxy Zoo and Dark Citizen Science project Google’s reCAPTCHA. We highlight that the reader has, likely unknowingly, provided unpaid techno-scientific labor to Google. We apply insights from our analysis of dark citizen science to traditional citizen science. Linking citizen science as practice and normative democratic ideal ignores how some science-citizen configurations actively pit practice against ideal. Further, failure to fully consider the implications of citizen science for science and society allows exploitative elements of citizen science to evade the sociological gaze.

 

Riley, J., & Mason-Wilkes, W. (2023). Dark citizen science. Public Understanding of Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625231203470