Rich Borschelt is the communication director for science at the Department of Energy, and recently attended a science communication workshop. He describes at some length his frustration at the failed model of science communication, in which every meeting hashes over the same futile set of assumptions: “Communication, Literacy, Policy: Thoughts on SciComm in a Democracy. After several other issues, he turns to the conferences’ attitude about scientists...
I recently came across Science Sites, a non-profit web company, courtesy of mathematician Steven Strogatz who has a site built by them. In some sense, I see some of what they’re doing to be enabling scientists to become part of the IndieWeb. It would be great to see them support standards like Webmention or functionality like Micropub as well. (It looks like they’re doing a lot of building on SquareSpace, so by proxy it would be great if they were supporting these open standards.) I love that it seems to have been created by a group of science journalists to help out the cause.
As I watch some of the Domain of One’s Own community in higher education, it feels to me that it’s primarily full of humanities related professors and researchers and doesn’t seem to be doing enough outreach to their science, engineering, math, or other colleagues who desperately need these tools as well as help with basic communication.
A few days ago, searching for something completely different, I came across a post by John Hawks — The futility of science communication conferences — which I duly bookmarked. The real point of that, of course, was to remind myself to go and read the foundation post: Communication, Literacy, Policy: Thoughts on SciComm in a Democracy, by Rick Borchelt.1 It’s a beaut, and not just because it pushes all my confirmation bias buttons.
At issue is what “veteran science blogger Ed Yong” describes as the fate of all discussions of science communications: an EntMoot.
And the causus belli? Who is responsible for the abysmal state of public literacy about science? Is it the scientists, who couldn’t communicate their way out of a paper bag? Is it the journos, who never understand that science is a process, not an end result in one of the big journals? Or their editors, ditto in spades?
Borchelt, who is, I think, still communications director for science at the U.S. Department of Energy, explains what I’ve always known:
He goes on, amusingly, and at length.
I strongly suspect that what Borchelt says of Americans is true of audiences everywhere, only the names would be different.
Why am I still exercised about this? When I was younger, I naively thought that if people had straightforward scientific information that they could understand, maybe with a little effort, their opinions about science would be based on facts. That is why I communicated science. I was wrong.
Borchelt again:
That’s just how it is. I wish it weren’t, but it is. Maybe I’m just being too negative, but I have a gut feeling that no amount of scicomm by practitioners or third parties is going to move the needle any further than Borchelt or I have seen it move over the past several decades. Sure, I personally would love to read more scientists’ writings, but I have not believed better communication will have any great impact on science literacy since the 1980s.
Now, where’s that one person in five who is science attentive?
Borchelt’s blog has been a bit idle for almost a year; I guess he’s been busy. ↩