Abstract
Driven by digitalization (and particularly the advent of the Internet), science communication nowadays includes more and different types of actors who produce and consume a wide array of heterogeneous content. As one consequence, scientists or scientific institutions and newspapers - as the traditional disseminators of scientific information - have lost their monopoly online and serve as only one information provider among others. These developments have led to more egalitarian, but also more controversial, discourses on science. However, these new forms of science communication are only partly mirrored by traditional models of science communication (e. g. by the deficit model) since these models fail to trace the complex communication processes resulting from the mentioned changes. Thus in our chapter we first briefly introduce the evolution of the most important science communication models and discuss their limitations in light of current developments. Second, based on their shortcomings, we develop a network-oriented perspective on science communication, which seeks to eradicate some flaws of the older models.
