Are We Citizen Scientists, Citizen Sensors or Something Else Entirely?

This chapter speculates the popular sensors, deployed at the individual scale in mobile phones or the city scale in smart cities, hold promise for a new informational landscape for citizens to monitor their world and mobilize their communities when threatened. It identifies five paradigms for the use of sensors by everyday citizens, such as smart cities, sensor journalism, crowdsourced journalism, citizen sensing and citizen science. The chapter describes two case studies of the use of sensors by everyday people that complicate and challenge some of these emancipatory claims. It proposes that the goal for popular sensing should not be the achievement of professional expertise by all citizens. Crowdsourced journalism practices are evolving to include not simply the use of the audience to collect data but also the involvement of citizens and communities in the audience at every stage of the journalistic process.