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One of the problems with assessing the emerging threats from advances in biotechnology and the life sciences is that there are two competing narratives for understanding biotechnology development: one based on the notion of a biotech revolution and the other based on biotech evolution. The biotech revolution is a dystopian tale in which scientific advances lead to rapid changes in biotechnology, its applications, and its potential threats. The biotech evolution, however, describes slower and more complex trajectories for biotechnology development and threats. These two narratives are based on different assumptions and analytic methods, which lead to fundamentally different conclusions. The US intelligence and policy communities use the biotech revolution story line to make sense of today’s bioweapons threats, but this approach fails to reflect the complex social, economic, scientific, and technical factors that shape biotechnology and life science developments. The author argues that more critical perspectives on biotechnology are needed in order to improve intelligence assessments of present and future bioweapons threats and policy regarding them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study explores the relative contributions of state rhetoric, the public sphere and corporate elite interests towards the construction of the 2010 US National Security Strategy (NSS). Interpreted thusly, the evolution in the US securitisation agenda illustrates the social construction of US securitisation strategy as a national artefact seemingly informed by local interests but framed within international uncertainty. Exploring the relative contributions of state rhetoric, the public sphere and corporate elite interests thusly, indicates that different threat matrixes emerge from the social forces that propel the 2010 NSS into being. The research, in accordance with its approach, finds that the focus of securing the threat of risk to national interests and assets within international uncertainty, results in the form of US securitisation strategy not fully realising its function of securitisation. Through deliberating on how and why particular threats are prioritised above others to the nation-state, this article seeks to motivate further research into the social construction of policy priorities to better understand how and why threat matrixes shift in the 21st Century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about digital television. Mainstream reports range from a vague televisual utopia where one need never unplug oneself from the TV ever again to the social realities and practicalities of a consumer driven market. This study examines how the media constructs the meaning of digital television in Britain, the United States and Australia. Rogers' (1983, 1995) diffusion of innovation theory to assess the rate of diffusion the role that media communication (language) plays in this process. It uses a content analysis methodology to examine 1836 digital television articles, drawn from mainstream newspaper publications from 1996 to January 2002. Results from the analysis show a correlation between the extent of media coverage; the media's strategic, flexible and timed use of technological determinism-social construction language structures; and the degree and success of the diffusion of digital television in these research settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]