In last week's discussion, several of you described a variety of "encounters" that you have had with public-oriented scientific communication, whether in the media, on consumer products, at work, or in some other forum. In our roles as students and critical observers of science communication, we have been able to gain some perspective on how these encounters are designed to work--that is, how the creators of a scientific text are hoping or expecting readers to react to the message. This perspective is also informed by our roles as recipients of these texts, whether we are members of the text's "intended audience" or an incidental audience.
Perhaps without even thinking about it, we are applying two intersecting sets of concepts to make sense of these encounters:
In the next two weeks, we will consider these concepts more carefully.
We might think of a "communication model" as the set of the most basic assumptions that we make about how communication works. During most exchanges, we do not need to stop to consider how communication works--we focus on the substance of the message itself. When communication breaks down, we may begin to raise questions about how communication works or fails to work (was it an error of the sender or the receiver? is the message itself poorly constructed or simply difficult to interpret? do some "meanings" lend themselves to specific kinds of communication--textual, verbal, visual--but not to others?). But even in those cases, I suspect that we all interpret communication problems in terms of our "default" communication model rather than imagining that the communication model is itself inadequate.
In Chapter 4, Gregory and Miller introduce three common models of communication: the linear model, the diffusion model, and the web model:
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Despite the simplicity of the first two models, it should be clear that they are rather weak models--they tell us far more about how senders might wish communication to work than they tell us about how it actually works. The more complex "web" model may be more useful insofar as it recognizes how meanings interact in the real world. For instance, research biochemists, pharmaceutical company representatives, doctors, and patients each send and receive messages in a complicated network of exchanges that may result in a diagnosis--a concrete and more or less intelligible result that springs from several mutually-informing sources of meaning.
Note that each of the first two models assume that "meaning" is a fixed and determinate object--something that a sender clearly knows, and that receivers either receive correctly or fail to receive. But we might consider carefully whether senders always "clearly know" their messages. If this is true, then the communication act plays no role in the creation of meaning--it's purely transactive. Opposed to this assumption is the possibility that meanings can emerge through communication--that meaning is a quality of communication itself, rather than a determinate object of thought that is simply shuttled from mind to mind with various degrees of precision.
How does all this relate to the "public understanding of science"? In order to discover how "the public" interprets scientific messages, we need to be able to understand, in a fairly sophisticated manner, how the communication process applies to cases of "public science" messages. If we apply the "linear" model of communication to even the simplest of public science communication messages, we're not likely to learn much about how the message works.
Consider a simple message: a cigarette pack with the inscription,
The surgeon general reports that smoking may cause cancer in laboratory animals.
The linear model provides few tools for understanding this message as a piece of science communication. The linear model consists of three elements--sender, transmitter, and receiver--in deceptively simple relationship to each other:
But several dilemmas arise. Is this transmitter reliable--does it communicate messages clearly? How do we distinguish the "transmitter" from the "sender"--do the other, conflicting messages inscribed on the cigarette package come from the same source? Do cigarette consumers receive singular messages like this one in a void or in the context of other such messages? Are these consumers really nothing more than passive recipients of the message, or do they talk back and alter the meaning in various other ways? Finally, how do we judge whether the message was properly received--is the communication successful if the receiver quits smoking? How about if she is able to confirm knowledge of the statement about lab rats? And is the message less determinate because its language is conditional? After all, "may cause cancer," read literally, does not really tell us anything at all about lab rats, much less about cigarettes--the true message, if there is a true message, has yet to be constructed.
As Gregory and Miller suggest in Chapters 4 and 5, we need to treat concepts like "audience" (or "receiver") and "sender," and even "science" and "understanding," with some care. Some communication models simplify these elements so far that they lose their meanings, to the detriment of our own appreciation of how science messages enter into public discourse. Part of the problem has to do with what communication model we apply as critical observers, but we would also do well to consider how different messages themselves imply different communication models. Many (perhaps all) messages create specific roles for readers and writers to occupy; that is, part of the message's meaning is a claim about how science communication works:
In our discussions of this week and next, I propose that we delve further into how science communications provide and articulate roles for participants to occupy, as well as how these roles relate to the communication models that we may implicitly or deliberately use to understand public science communication.
This list identifies some of the many professional communication settings in which science writing skills might be used; I'm confident that you can imagine many others. Each of these settings is likely to involve different audiences, messages, and communicators. Imagine how you might diagnose specific communication tasks in one or more of these settings by means of the communication models and roles discussed in this week's reading and discussion.
1. Medical and pharmaceutical industries
2. Technical or scientific manufacturing industries
3. Government, nonprofit, and other "public interest" institutions (e.g., health education initiatives, environmental causes, institutions of the peace movement, etc.)
4. Legal environments: law offices, courts, etc.
5. Scientific journalism: both the scientific press and the mainstream press
Gregory and Miller, Science in Public: Communication, Culture, and Credibility
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