I am interested in controversies surrounding emerging technologies (e.g. nanotechnology, synthetic technology, surveillance technology) and how ´online social data´ can be utilized as a source to better understand and anticipate the dynamics around such debates.

By social data online I am referring to digital objects such as links, tags, pictures, log files and blog-comments that are increasingly left by people on the web as part of their everyday life. Essential characteristics of such data is that it is tracable and easy to synthesize and visualize through different kind of information-management tools. This seems to provide the possibility to harness the ’collective intelligence’ of the web in understanding social dynamics.

My research is on the one hand focused on whether such data and tools can improve organizational practices of policy-making and on the other hand on the implicit politics and epistemology in the way these tools operate.