Changing Minds Through Science Communication: My 2 Cents On A Panel On Framing Science

So before turning in for the night, I thought I should jot down some of my initial reactions to one of the final presentations at the 2008 Science Blogging Conference here in North Carolina. Despite the commitment to an "unconference" format, this plenary session was a rather typical panel discussion with a moderator, three speakers, and a session of Q&A. If this was "unconference," I remain unimpressed. Regardless, it was the big draw session of the event as it had the closest thing to a celebrity appearance with the inclusion of Chris Mooney as one of the presenters. Mooney is co-author of the blog The Intersection as well as a freelance writer and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World. Joining Mooney as presenters were Sheril Kirshenbaum, the other half of The Intersection and a marine biologist at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke, and Jennifer Jacquet, author of the blog Shifting Baselines and a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre.

Their session was titled Changing Minds Through Science Communication: A Panel on Framing Science. To be honest, it seemed very little time was paid to the framing science part, with most of the effort spent at plugging the Science Debate 2008 efforts of Mooney, Kirshenbaum and others. Which is all well and good, but perhaps make that part of the title? I would think that's good framing?

The first speaker up, Jennifer Jacquet, spent the most time of the three focused on the issue of framing. Her premise seemed to be that science is losing the battle for public attention and interest due to the media's preoccupation with news of Brittany Spears custody battles or her last weekend bender. I thoroughly agree that we have a problem when front page news is focused on Anna Nicole Smith and climate change news is buried somewhere in the Lifestyles Section (if it appears at all). I think it would have been great to hear her (or the other panelists) ruminate a little on the "chicken or the egg" side of the equation. In other words, is the media feeding a prurient interest that was always there (or emerging) or did the media itself create this preoccupation. I suspect it's not a neat either/or dichotomy, but it would still have been a fascinating discussion.

Next up, Kirshenbaum presented what I can only describe as a lead-in for Mooney's 15 minutes. She gave a bit of chronology on where Science Debate 2008 came from and why it was an important opportunity. I must admit to being underwhelmed. Again, this was supposed to be unconference, or Conference 2.0, or some other cutting-edge, experimental, breaking-down-the-walls-of-convention type of event. You might imagine my surprise when she approached the podium and began reading, verbatim, her entire presentation from paper. Huh?! I mean it was replete with appropriate "Uhms" and inflection to create the illusion of extemporaneous speech, but she totally phoned this one in.

Finally, Mooney took the podium. He sketched out the landscape of science writers over the past several generations. While he agreed that "popularizers" of science such as Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Carl Sagan, and others sold a lot of books and raised the level of science discussion, he thinks that the discussion was mostly to an audience either predisposed to science or already receptive. To Mooney, the real challenge in front of us is bridging the gap to an audience either unreceptive or down right hostile to science. Using the analogy of his blog title, he said that such bridging of worldviews only happens through what he calls intersection collisions--opportunities for discussion and understanding when science-rich and science-absent issues meet. The examples of the teaching of evolution, science and religion, and climate change were raised as exemplars of such collisions. For me, this was the most engaging segment of the session, and again it would have been nice if Mooney had taken the discussion a bit further to describe what "Post-Collision Landscape" might look like. But instead, he went back to more Science Debate 2008 plugging before wrapping up for the Q&A.

Mooney is a polished and obviously gifted speaker. He's pretty good at self promotion too, as every one of his Powerpoint slides had the cover of his books in the upper-right corner. He's not too hard on the eyes either. But I have to give this session a C+ for delivering on what was promised as well as not really honoring the spirit of the conference's format. If I'm reading the unconference philosophy correctly, it's that the sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage. You didn't get that from this panel. It seemed at least to me to be more about bestowing pearls of wisdom over investing in a socratic dialogue.

One notable moment during Q&A is worth mentioning. A representative from the local MSNBC affiliate spoke up about how we as a science community can whine all we want about how the media doesn't pay attention to science, but we should realize this is not only reality and that there's nothing we can do to change it, but that there's more of this to come in the future. Media is big business and news about Brittany, and Paris, and Anna Nicole sells. I must admit that I think the newscaster thought she was speaking to a room full of scientists only. Actually, I'm not quite certain what the fuck she was talking about. Of the science bloggers in that room, some were scientists, but many (perhaps most?) were not. Even if it was a room full of just scientists, when did it become a forgone conclusion that the general public is not interested in science? Maybe people have problems with the politicization of scientific issues or when science threatens individual worldviews or hopes, but show me a child that isn't a natural scientist.

And if blogging is anything, I think that it IS an adaptive response to the black hole of media science coverage. It's writers (yes some of us are scientists) taking matters into our own hands and filling the void left by media's neglect of our work and values. Will big media change? I dunno, but this room was filled with people who were neither seeing the long-term prospects as futile nor were they sitting on their hands. They're (yeah, I hope I'm among them too) writing about science and maybe even changing (maybe even reframing?) opinions and minds at the same time. Certainly an honorable and worthy enterprise.