What Characterizes the Controversy about the Paleo Diet?
We consider knowledge controversies as force fields where ever (e)merging actors or publics are causing ontological disturbance and thereby slow down the process of reasoning. In other words the ontological disturbances caused by a range of disagreements or concerns create uncertainty which foster emergence and dedication from different publics.
But who is concerned and what are they talking about when it comes to the Paleo diet? Take a closer look at the issuenetwork to your right; what do you see? To us a striking observation is that no governmental (light blue nodes) or institutional bodies are prominent figures in or engaging with the .com (purple) actors that mostly define the network and therefore the issue (based on our entry into the issue on the web). Put in another way it seems that there are no governmental or institutional guidelines in connection to controversy of the Paleo Diet. As a general observation we find that the central actors in the controversy are individuals and this is why we in the following will focus on the emergence of these individual actors in the controversy: what exactly trickers their involvement with the Paleo Diet? It is important to stress though that we consider the individuals serving as role models of bigger tendencies within the issue. The controversial point of the Paleo Diet is especially situated in the diversity of concerns related to the matter among different actors with different forms of expertise. A specific example of this can be found amongst archaeologists, who show concern towards the way "the caveman" is used as an explanatory element in the Paleo diet. We invite you to take a closer look at the qualitative entry of central actors to get an even more tangible experience of the controversial point of the Paleo Diet. |
The two visualizations above were designed to illustrate an interesting point in the hyperlink structure. '##assosiative"' -linking. Where each site tries to give its collaborators larger authority in the network by linking. In our issuecrawler-network this was done by the largest actor. (the site about.com) which had a whole army of subsites, (jobs.about.com etc) forming a huge cluster of links. We decided to filter all 140 about.com sites. Then we saw a similar structure with the government sites, instead of throwing them out we kept them with as a point. However we did not leave them intact. The top illustration nodes are sized by in degree, but below we gave another condition to the in degree count, that .gov linking to .gov would not be counted. After penalizing the government institutions we see that almost all of them are non-existing. We see that the last one standing, the blue near the center has genuine interaction with the hyperlink network.
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