风险网络:作为非人行动者的媒介与社会风险的生成

Risk Networks: Media as Non-human Actors and the Generation of Social Risks

身处贝克所言的风险社会,个体对风险的感知除了亲身经历外,更多地是源于媒介提示的风险图景。大众传播时代,媒介是风险的中介化,是风险的社会放大站。但伴随着深度媒介化,风险的社会放大这种线性传递观具有明显的解释局限性。随着行动者主体的增多以及行动者网络异质性的提高,媒介在呈现风险的同时,自身也在生成风险。基于行动者网络理论视角,新媒体时代媒介化治理的关键不在于技术层面如何传递风险信息,而在于如何减少因为媒介化传播产生的“次生风险”。行动者网络视角进一步明确了当下社会风险的本质,即作为网络的风险是多元行动者共同作用的结果,是兼具不确定性和动态生成性的非线性存在。

In the risk society described by Ulrich Beck, in addition to personal experience, individuals’ perception of risks comes from the risk picture prompted by the media. In the era of mass communication, the media is the social amplification station of risks from the perspective of mediation. However, this linear transmission view has obvious limitations in the Internet age, because with the increase number of actors and the increase of actor network’s heterogeneity, the media are not presenting risks but also generating risks. From the perspective of actor network, the key to media governance in the new media era is not how to transmit risk information at the technical level, but how to reduce the secondary risk caused by media themselves. What’s more, the network perspective further clarifies the nature of current social risk, that is, the risk as a network is the result of the joint action of multiple actors, and it is a nonlinear existence with both uncertainty and dynamism.