Imagining Ordinary Citizens? Conceptualized and Actual Participants for Deliberations on Emerging Technologies

In this paper, we explore conceptualizations of 'ordinary' citizens common in public engagement forums on emerging technologies and assumptions from deliberative theory that ordinary people are more likely to be appropriately 'changed' through deliberative processes facilitated by experts. Looking at a large US public forum event [the National Citizens Technology Forum (NCTF)], we asked: What were the goals for this exercise and how did they shape conceptualizations of ordinariness and representativeness? Whose goals and conceptualizations were they? Were the engaged citizens ordinary and representative-and were they changed by the exercise? Our exploration revealed that exercise organizers conceived of ordinary citizens as people lacking science and technology backgrounds, without advocacy or business connections to the technologies at hand, and demographically reflecting the US population. Exercise materials also implied that ideal ordinary participants would lack strong opinions and emotions about these technologies. Actual NCTF participants, however, tended to be more educated, have higher incomes, and to be more liberal than the US public, and participants from all backgrounds had a range of relevant knowledge, experiences and opinions about science and technology. They were changed by the exercise in complex and conflicting ways-based as much on their own knowledge and reflections on relational dynamics as on exercise processes, interactions with experts, and information provided in the exercise. We argue that inadequately explored ideas about ordinary citizens are highly problematic. Further, invisible assumptions aboutwhat is 'normal' among experts and status quo institutions serve to reify the lay-expert divide that engagement exercises are intended to counteract.