The previous chapter explored some of the ways in which technoscience is represented in public and popular culture, finding science in shampoo adverts and in promises about future technologies, and observing scientists both in their stereotypical guises and as real people who may be squeezed out of public media because of assumptions about what researchers look like. One thing that wasn't discussed was how such portrayals of science are received. How do publics engage with such representations, and with science and technology more broadly?

This question is the focus of this chapter, which covers how laypeople consume, engage with, protest, and otherwise negotiate technoscience. Of course, these aspects often overlap: even when we consume* forms of science communication such as science documentaries or books, for instance, we are also actively making sense of scientific knowledge, fitting it into our existing knowledges and understandings. Any communication process is active, even those that focus on the transfer of information. When I give lectures to students (or as I write this book), I might like to think that I am seamlessly transferring knowledge from my mind to those of others, but in reality they (and you) are taking in some aspects and not others, fitting ideas into pre-existing frames or concepts, disagreeing with or rejecting some things, and all in all making sense of the content I discuss in their (your) own ways. When we encounter non-scientists engaging with technoscience we should therefore expect sophisticated negotiations of its content rather than passive absorption. Indeed, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, we should also expect to see technoscience being made – co-constituted – in nonscientific spaces. This chapter therefore overlaps in substantive ways with several others, highlighting themes of active public engagement with technoscience and the intersections of scientific and other knowledges that we see throughout.

An initial example demonstrates some of these dynamics. Health communication is one important way in which technoscientific knowledge becomes visible in our lives, perhaps especially during times of crisis (such as the COVID-19 pandemic) but also more generally, as we are exhorted to stop smoking or get vaccinated or are given advice about how to manage conditions or illnesses.