Viewpoint-14 August 2003 |
Harry Robinson Returns With a Challenge to Scientists and "SciComs" |
Editor's Note: Last Sunday (August 10th) on the ABC's Ockham's Razor, science communicator Julian Cribb took, according to the ABC, "a critical look at our ability to create knowledge and our reluctance to share it," and continued, "An ominous trend is developing in the 21st Century - the world is dividing into those with easy access to knowledge and the power that goes with it and those without." (the talk is also available in Real audio if you can take the two minute musical intro).
It's an eloquent
argument that Julian Cribb put in his Ockham's Razor talk. He spoke in favour of
wider sharing of scientific knowledge. He said, correctly, that scientists are
good at discovering knowledge but bad at communicating it. And he made a strong
case for the social benefits of open sharing.
All that is fine and dandy but where did Cribb take us? Pretty close to a
question time.
Share the knowledge with whom? And how?
A decisive majority of our people have no understanding of scientific method, no
skills to read scientific papers and precious little time to look at pop
versions of same. In plain language, they are locked out by their own
limitations. It gets worse: they not only don't want to be shown or taught, they
want not to learn the stuff. Cribb seems to assume a broad public appetite for
knowledge. In a story loosely attributed to Socrates, the human tendency is to
prefer shadows to reality. Knowledge has little to do with a good life.
Scan major media up market or down market and the evidence is open to all -- our people
prefer dramas, melodramas, catastrophes, crimes and contests to fact, knowledge
or learning. The turgid sequence of Shane Warne's indiscretions will beat advanced
endocrinology every time. Sharing mathematical thought or earth and life
sciences with the mass audience is a forlorn proposition.
Let's go up market to the 15% or so who have some education and curiosity
about the nature of our world and above average literacy. These are the people
who can be expected to buy quality newspapers and magazines, listen to the ABC's
Science Show and watch Catalyst on TV. Even in this social layer the taste for
scientific knowledge is limited. Papers such as The Sydney Morning Herald,
The
Age and the Australian do carry some news from science -- but not much. This is
not because their editors are cretins: they aren't. They have fairly shrewd
assessments of how much their readers will accept. Go further upmarket and look
at the circulations of specialist magazines such as Nature, Science,
or the semi-popular Scientific
American. They are pitifully small. In air media, Robin Williams has put a
working life into spreading the good news from lecture hall and laboratory but
he has not been able to get more than a small slice of the network's air time.
Cribb's assumption that there's an eager public for knowledge from nerdland is
dubious. And what of the reverse side of the coin -- that scientists are hiding their
lights from the world? Some probably are and a few probably hold back out of
jealousy, miserliness and irrational secrecy. But in this matter of
communicating to the public, most are
inept. Their strongest driver is professional achievement. They don't care a lot
about publishing their results for lay consumption, it's a bore
and they imagine that word smithing is an inferior craft.
So much for the bleak aspects of the Cribb thesis. Surely something positive can
be done? Of course. So long as the scientific community is prepared to use its
own spin doctors. All right, that term is odious. Let's say
science-communicators, SciComs for short. They need to be people with an
understanding of scientific endeavour and a thorough knowledge of media. Their job? To
exploit every pathway through existing media to the public.
The world of media is now a labyrinth. Look at your newspaper with all its
sections. Each one has an editor, a clutch of specialist writers and
contributors for home, motoring, dining, sporting, personal finance, commerce,
fashion, IT...and so on. Multiply them out across all papers, add in hundreds of
magazines each with an editor, section editors, feature writers, specialist
contributors. Try to get an overview of air media's more useful programs, again
with an executive producer, a show producer, a presenter and so on and so on. An
effective SciCom will know where and with whom to try to place what the trade
calls a "story." A good SciCom will see a piece of Cribb's knowledge and will
realise that this editor or that could be interested. The same good SciCom will
recognise the piece which will not appeal to an editor but may well ring a bell
with certain feature writers who may pick it up and sell it up the line to an
editor. The twists and turns make sense only to those who have a map of the
labyrinth.
The notion of using a pack of SciComs depends on scientists surrendering their
hold on knowledge, throwing the fruits of their efforts into a market which
they'd rather not visit themselves. Not in person anyway.
One could draft a fistful of schemes to organise the dissemination of scientific
knowledge but one factor would remain constant -- the initiative would have to come
from scientists -- as Julian Cribb rightly indicated. He did us a good service by
opening the question of sharing scientific knowledge. Sharing with whom and how
remain open questions.
Harry Robinson
--
who for 25 years worked in television journalism in Oz
and the US and who was for several years air media critic for the Sydney
Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald.
Editor: We don't know what Robinson is worried about. Dr. Nelson has just announced another committee with a $22 million budget which will see to it that, "Australia’s research information will be more easily accessible and better managed... to further enhance our nation’s research capacity."