Amanda Olszewski
When first given this assignment I was at a loss as to what issue I was going to focus on seeing as though Communications is a very broad topic of study. My first thought went towards the way our communication is changing due to advancements in technology and the Internet, but then I felt that topic has been beaten to death lately and I didn’t need to add to it’s execution. I then started thinking in terms of communications in the business aspect, since I am also a marketing minor. This got me looking around at different sights, stumbling upon things like “How to Improve Communications within Management,” and “Proper Business Communication and Etiquette,” all things that did not strike my interest or any passions of mine enough to produce anything fruitful. And so, I digressed; looking for something that, stuck my interest, but was still foreign enough to me that I would not bring in my own biases into the mix. That got me thinking about the growing concern about environmental issues. Being a self proclaimed environment concernist, I decided to plug in the terms “Public Communications” into the Environmental section of the library search engine. This lead me to articles voicing the growing concern with the way science is being communicated to the public. They mentioned the challenges being faced due to the increase in content choices being put out by the media. This sounded like the perfect topic for me; something dealing with the environment and communications. So then it was time to narrow down my search. After pondering the topic for a while I decided to pursue the question, Will increasing/improving communication between scientists and the public, increase social involvement in environmental issues? This is worth researching to me because I believe that in order to make serious changes in the way we use and treat our environment, the more important it is to inform the masses of the challenges and changes we face in terms they can understand.
In starting my research I decided it would be important for me to first understand the current standards and struggles being faced by science communication. I began by searching “Effects of bad communication between science and the public,” and found a very useful article about the protocol of science communication. The article was coincidentally titled “A Protocol for Science Communication for the Public Understanding of Science,” which came from an excerpt from Steve Miller and Jane Gregory. Science in Public: communication, culture and credibility, and helped give me a good understanding about what is coming to be expected of both scientists and the public when dealing with the issue of communicating science through different media. The article started off talking about how scientist’s role in communicating with the public has changed due to the changes in political and social circumstances. Claiming that people are being influenced by so many different mediums giving them many different sources of information and leading them to many different opinions and information. They then started talking about the current relationship between scientists and the media. Their next point was one I had never really thought about and that was that the media, although it does in fact serve as the middle man in most cases between scientists and the public, they are not responsible in increasing the publics understanding of the sciences and all it’s essentials. Another new pattern this article brought to light for me was that since media today is so “I want it not” most of the science being preformed is in the moment and does not always have an answer right away. So when people are reading about these in the now sciences being studied and they don’t have and exact answer yet, they tend to make up their own ending to the experiment and rarely return to the issue when the experiments are completed. This to me gave insight into some of the challenges scientists are facing in trying to get their finding out there and understood. The article continues to give the following seven “protocols” for effective communication: 1.) Acknowledge the Place of Popularization 2.)Being Clear About Motives 3.) Respecting the Audience 4.)Negotiating New Knowledge, Understanding and Attitudes 5.) Establishing a Basis For Trust 6.)Acknowledging the Social in Science 7.) Facilitating Public Participation. These points set standards, suggest improvements for science communications and give direction to both the public and to scientists as to how to meet half way when communicating to each other. So by now I have gained a pretty good understanding of the changing relationship and responsibilities of both the scientist and the public when trying to better understand one another, but this information also lead me to think, If the media is demanding answers before they were able to give them, and the people are demanding the media to give them answers, and the media needs people to buy their magazines, how can scientists make sure their discoveries are being properly exposed?
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