This article presents the results of a study carried out in Italy by the Permanent Observatory on science communication through the media. The aim of this research project coordinated by the staff of the Master’s Degree in Science Communication, ISAS, Trieste, in collaboration with Ilesis S.r.l., Rome, is to monitor and analyse systematically the amount of scientific information on TV and in the press.

This paper is concerned with the interactions between information technology and the humanities, and focuses on how the humanities have changed since adopting computers. The debate among humanists on the subject initially focuses on the alleged methodological changes brought about by the introduction of computing technology. It subsequently analyses the changes in research that were caused by IT not directly but indirectly, as a consequence of the changes effected on society as a whole. After briefly summarising the history of the interactions between information technology and the humanities, the paper draws on literature to examine the way humanists have perceived the evolution of their disciplines. The paper concludes by fitting the phenomenon into a model of scientific revolution.

Communicating modern biotechnologies is certainly no easy task. To tackle such a complex and future-oriented assignment, help may arrive, paradoxically, from the past, from ancient rhetorical tradition, and in particular from Aristotle, the most renowned rhetoric teacher of all time. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle suggested that to be persuasive speakers should make use of widely accepted opinions (endoxa), i.e. the common sense shared by all. Common sense is expressed in common truths and value-laden maxims. Common sense, however, is not flat but dialectical, in that it includes contrasting subjects. While reasoning, orators do not just passively report a conception of an unchanging world, but they reproduce the contrasting conceptions included in common sense. In the case of the debate about Biotechnologies, the contrasting conceptions can be found in the Natural/Artificial dualism, in the dichotomy between an attitude marked by obscurantism and suspicion of scientific and technological innovation and that of a scientistic attitude.

What may be defined as the "standard model" of the public communication of science began to develop in the second half of the nineteenth century, gained a clear structure (especially in an Anglo-Saxon context) in the first three decades of the twentieth century and dominated until the nineties. Roughly speaking, the model tends to describe science as a compact social (and epistemic) corpus, largely separated from the rest of society by a type of semipermeable membrane. That is, information and actions can flow freely from science to the rest of society (through the application of technologies and the spread of scientific culture, for instance), but much more limitedly in the opposite direction (through science politics or the influence of sociocultural events on science itself).

There is no use denying it: whenever a scientist gets a piece of news in a newspaper or on television concerning his own field of research, eight times out of ten he feels irritated. The reason does not solely depend on the fact that, in his opinion, the news given to the public is often rather inaccurate or centred on secondary aspects, sometimes even distorted. There is actually something more? Something deeper that the scientist can hardly grasp.

According to Einstein's renowned declaration, for those who believe in physics ­ or, more precisely, in its capability to offer a "scientific" representation of the world ­ the distinction between present, past and future is just "an illusion, though obstinate". If we consider an effective analogy by Mauro Dorato, we can state that those who agree with the famous German scientist will recognize in the present, past and future a relationship very similar to that between "here" and "somewhere else" ­ in other words, the present is just a located moment and has no privileged status.