Pros And Cons Of Technical Democracy By Michel Callon

Great Essays
The book, acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy examines the limits of liberal and deliberative democracies with growing technological society and also proposes solutions for the uncertainties prevailing because of them. Michel Callon, one of the authors is a main scholarly driving force of the book. He is well reputed French Sociologist and friend and colleague of Bruno Latour, but inclined toward more applied and less abstract approach than him. It mainly focuses on the vision that how science and technology effect the democracy, how they can help to democratize democracy, other advanced concepts in Actor Network Theory and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge.

In the opening pages of the book, Callon et.al considerably
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Like I said earlier, they proposed the hybrid forums as a solution to solve the controversies of uncertainties, so Dialogic democracy perfectly fitted into this model. They argued that Dialogic democracy is better than delegated democracy because it provides space to different stake holders to come on one table to solve their problems(p-207). They believed that controversies make democracy more democratic by opening open forums for discussion. It provides hybrid forums to the marginalized groups of the society to raise their concerns over the specific uncertainties. And this interaction of layperson with the scientific expertise to reduce the level of mistrust and force experts to take their fears into account(p-226). Later they define the who is to be called an expert and talk about their domain and space of democracy in their domain. Here, they tried to join experts and politicians, that was very interesting and complete the notion of technical democracy in my views(p-228). But they also criticized the experts, that they don’t want to be part of the hybrid forums. Because hybrid forums will give access to lay person to hold them accountable for their failures to find a solution for uncertainties(p-228). But I think for me technical democracy will be the mixture of layperson, experts, politicians …show more content…
I think It’s a really comprehensive and complicated book to understand and it takes usually long time as compared to other books as I struggled a lot to understand different advance concepts and discussions. That’s how I realized that why authors were emphasizing to overcome the gap between layperson and experts through the hybrid forum. I apprehended the importance of hybrid forums as now I think the uncertainties of this world are so complicated to understand them alone.
The best thing about this work of Callon et.al is the solutions they gave as a result of their criticism. I find their criticism over secluded research and delegated democracy very productive. I agree with the authors that the debate on the technical controversies in public forums provided by democratic system make it more reliable and democratic in nature. It also gives a deeper understanding of actor network theory. An important and interesting book for understating uncertainties of the

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