Page 141 - Demo

Discussion and Conclusions1396opponents become more dominant, more types of visualisations are used and a greater variety of visual content is included in them. In addition, visualisations of the controversy can change over time in relation to the extent to which the controversy polarises. In Mexico, for example, at an early stage, a considerable amount of visualisations that express the idea of a promising technology were used in the online controversy, but when the controversy intensified, their use decreased and more visualisations with the meaning of environmental risk were used online.The results in Chapter 5 show that on the open Web, visualisations of nanotechnology in food are also used in the context of food production, food waste, the agri-food sector and GMOs. Limited data suggests that in different topical contexts, the meaning of the same visualisation changes – the same visual can be used both with a positive and negative sentiment when used for different topics.Overall, the analysis of circulation of visualisations on Twitter and the open Web is a way of studying how policy controversies develop online. The combination of an analysis of the networks of visualisations forming around a topic with the analysis of the stance of the actors using them and an in-depth interpretive analysis of the textual-visual storylines can show how the controversy evolves. This can perhaps indicate when controversies tend to escalate, polarise or calm down.6.2 ConclusionsI started this research with a puzzle about visualisations as powerful meaningmakers in policy controversies. In this section, using the conceptual framework I developed of three aspects of visualisations’ meaning-making, I introduce my conclusions, which try to make this less of a puzzle (see Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2012, p. 27).6.2.1 Type and ContentThere are three conclusions to draw on the role of the type and content of visuals in policy controversies. First of all, the fact that in the controversies I have studied, ‘scientific’ visualisations are used extensively, more by opponents than by Efrat.indd 139 19-09-2023 09:47