Living with Uncertainty : Public Reason and Technological Futures in Swedish Public Service Media

Sammanfattning

How can public reasoning continue when complex technologies can no longer be fully explained, predicted, or governed with certainty? This thesis explores that question through close textual and multimodal analysis of eight programs produced by the Swedish public service broadcasters, Sveriges Television (SVT) and Sveriges Radio (SR) between 2020 and 2025. The research material is drawn from television documentaries and radio programs on nuclear energy and artificial intelligence and examines how broadcasters help audiences make sense of futures that cannot be settled by definitive answers. The two technological fields place uncertainty in very different temporal and institutional forms. Nuclear issues unfold on a geological timescale far beyond ordinary political cycles and individual human life, while artificial intelligence develops as a rapidly changing technological horizon that institutions continually struggle to keep pace with. In response to these conditions, the broadcasts analyzed in this thesis no longer treat uncertainty as a temporary gap in knowledge waiting to be solved by experts. Uncertainty increasingly appears as a lasting condition around which democratic societies must learn to organize themselves. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), mediatization theory, cognitive scaffolding, and democratic theory, the thesis argues that Swedish public service media respond to this condition through three connected forms of work. First, they build cognitive scaffolding through metaphor, pacing, montage, atmosphere, and multimodal composition, making complex scientific and technological systems more understandable without removing their ambiguity. Second, they organize unresolved uncertainty into relatively stable institutional forms through temporal framing, procedural ordering, and the deliberate suspension of final judgment. Third, under conditions where no actor can fully claim certainty, the broadcasts reshape democratic relations themselves. Expertise becomes more self-limiting and openly vulnerable, trust shifts away from prophetic authority toward visible institutional practice, and audiences are addressed as what this thesis calls capable but uncertain citizens. To describe the broader democratic arrangement produced through these operations, the thesis develops the concept of durable openness: a condition in which uncertainty is maintained in a sufficiently stable form to support long-term public discussion, contestation, and governance. The thesis also argues that these democratic arrangements remain fragile and politically ambivalent. Structural openness can preserve public deliberation while also diffusing responsibility. Procedural trust can support democratic orientation while also draining the politics from infrastructures shaped by economic and political power. The capable citizen imagined by these broadcasts may also be more aspirational than representative. Through these operations, Swedish public service media help democratic societies keep reasoning about technological futures whose answers cannot yet be supplied.