O.Marsh
10/11/15
SHAC Talk #1
Who are the Audiences for Science Communication in the TwentyFirst Century?
Introduction
[Introductory guff].
So the question that prompts this talk is ‘who are the audiences for science communication
in the Twenty-First century?’. It’s quite a broad question. And hopefully it won’t come as
too much of a disappointment when I say that I am not going to answer it, directly. The
purpose of this talk is to think about ways in which we might go about tackling this question
using research, specifically twentieth and twenty-first century into audiences, into sciencesociety relations, and into media, which you may wish to use to find your own way of
tackling this question. Some of this work may be familiar to many of you, in which case my
apologies, but as I’m not really familiar with this audience I’m am assuming a fairly low level
of familiarity with contemporary research into audiences, and I’ll be aiming for breadth
rather than depth. [INTRODUCE STRUCTURE]. I should also at this point thank Dr Emily
Dawson from my department, as I’ve borrowed much of this material from her lectures on a
similar topic, though of course any mistakes or failures of clarity are all mine.
Section 1- Methodologies and Methods
As a first step, it’s worth considering exactly what we mean by ‘science communication’.
We can think of it very narrowly, as outputs on TV, or print media, or blogs, or whatever
that is consciously and specifically designed to educate people about science. But we can
also think broadly. When you read the instruction manual for an electronic device, or visit
our local doctor, or see a toothpaste advert, then you are – whether you like it or not – the
recipients of messages about science – about its potential role in our lives, about its
authority as a source of information, and we’re getting these messages all the time.
This has to frame our first approach to the question, ‘what sort of people are the audiences
for science communication?’. Because if we’re going to take the broad view of science
communication then the answer is literally everyone. Or, as this group is more normally
known, the “general public”. Some of you might think that’s a bit overly harsh. When we
talk about ‘the general public’ we often have this intuitive image of a large group of people
who lack a particular knowledge or expertise, which the communication will provide them
with. But this intuitive idea is not an easy one to work with. This imagined group can
encompass anything from professional scientists finding out something outside their field of
expertise to someone who dropped out of school at 16 who’s now trying to understand
their kid’s medical condition. It’s not an easy category to research, and it’s not an easy
category to design a science communication. Nonetheless, it does persist to a worrying
degree. I remember asking a science student who they were aiming a planned podcast at.
They initially said ‘the general public’, but when I queried them it turns out they meant
‘people with diabetes’. [FINISH OFF].
Instead, researchers usually segment the audience using a variety of [WHATS – maybe
mention axiology?] and methods. For instance, for many science communication activities it
is often useful to gauge people’s interest in and attitudes to science. But this isn’t just a case
of quantifying, or measuring along a scale. The examples I used before, of the professional
scientist looking to broaden their knowledge versus the parent trying to find out about their
kid’s medical condition, show how interest can take a variety of different forms, and it’s not
the case that one person can be seen as straightforwardly ‘more interested’ in science.
Section 2 – What Kinds of People?
Instead, this sort of research tends to use descriptive clusters, which are derived from
finding out about how people experience science communication activities. A major
example of this in the UK is [PAS STUFF].
[LINK inc. benefits]. But this research has, of course, been criticised from a variety of angles.
For example, survey questions are often subject to a bit of [TERM] as people often want to
be seen as more interested in science than they actually are. Another criticism is that from
one-off surveys you can’t really see any changes over time, which leaves unanswered all
sorts of questions about cause and effect – so do science communication activities cause
people to be more interested in science, or do people’s prior interests cause them to seek
out more science communication activities? Or a bit of both? And if so, is one more
dominant than the other? And so on and so on.
[LINK?] But you can ask the same sort of questions from quite a different start-point. For
instance, the US-based researcher John Falk frames the question more narrowly – what
makes people interested in visiting science museums? And instantly that lends itself to a
different set of methods. Within a museum you have access to what researchers call
‘natural data’, i.e. you can see people actually doing things. [MORE].
Following quite a few years of this sort of activity, Falk – along with his colleague Lynn
Dierking – has produced [THAT CLASSIFICATION]. [COMPARE WITH PAS].
However, as a conclusion to this section, I just want to note the risks of segmenting
audiences solely by interest-based categories. When it comes to science communication
this is often an obvious category – [EXPLAIN]. However there are other fairly
straightforward ways of segmenting an audience which are important but can fall by the
wayside. For instance, socio-demographic segmentation. In a critique of John Falk’s
interest-based model, Emily Dawson and Erik Jensen have noted that it only studies an
audience who are already in the museum. But there are a whole range of people who don’t
go to museums, and this isn’t necessarily a problem of not being interested but of being
excluded in some way; whether because of expense, language barriers, or even because the
museum offers a very Western-centric picture of ‘science’ or a very middle-class space –
think of expensive museum coffee shops – which is not a welcoming leisure space for many.
Again, this can be studied – [EMILY’S WORK] – but [WHAT]. [INTERSECTIONS].
So to conclude this section, I’d note two things. It’s hard to say whether any given social
research method, or way of segmenting an audience, is ‘right’ in the sense of ‘correct’ or
‘true’. Instead, it’s often more productive to ask whether it’s useful for your particular
purpose. But there are also questions about whether certain methods are morally right,
and we also have to ask who isn’t even appearing in the research question. To make one
more attack on the idea of the ‘general public’, when someone says the ‘general public’ it
can often sound a bit like they mean ‘someone like me but a bit less expert’. However
engaging or enthusiastic Brian Cox is, if his presentation of science as an achievement of
Western wealthy people is the pinnacle of BBC science communication then maybe we need
to ask some deeper questions.
Section 3 – Some Theories
[Start]. These questions have really become a keystone of much STS research into science
communication since 2001, with the rise of what has become known as the ‘public
engagement’ movement, also known as the ‘dialogic turn’ in some quarters. To understand
this phenomenon, we really need to take a detour back to the 1980s. More specifically to
1985 [PUS -> PES stuff]. [CONCLUDE WITH STILGOE V DAVIES].
The story I’ve just told is a fairly canonical account, and for a fuller version I’d recommend
the work of Simon Lock. But it’s also maybe possible to contextualise the story as an
outcome of a broader academic movement across many sectors of social research, towards
seeing audiences as actively drawing on their personal experiences and identities.
For instance, we can look at educational psychology. At one point [WHEN] this was
dominated by ‘behaviourist’ perspectives which saw learning as the accumulation of simple
skills to form more complicated skills. However throughout the [when] various alternative
perspectives appeared. The ‘cognitive’ perspective argued that people construct
understanding by trying to connect new information with their prior knowledge. The
‘sociocultural’ perspective developed this further, by arguing that people develop skills and
knowledge by hanging around in groups and becoming proficient in the practices valued by
those groups. [EXAMPLES IN SCICOMM?].
Another example is work in cultural or media studies. The history of this field often sets
itself up against as past model in which audiences were conceptualised as passive recipients
of media messages, and become brainwashed by advertising, Hollywoodisation, and
suchlike. This was opposed by Stuart Hall of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, who
developed the highly influential ‘encoding/decoding’ model. In this model, individuals
[WHAT]. However this has been criticised by some media scholars for assuming that the
individual is actually concentrating on that single text. With the development of
technologies such as multi-channel television or hyperlinked websites, many scholars argue
that we shouldn’t be focussing on single texts, but instead thinking about how readers jump
from text to text – so for instance, how someone might watch a TV programme while
Tweeting about it while also going to Wikipedia for background information. This has been
called media convergence.
So that’s left us with a plethora of approaches. The point I’m making is that none of these
are self-evidently right or wrong – even those supposedly ‘supplanted’ theories have a habit
of making occasional comebacks in some form or another. But all of these share a common
commitment towards seeing audience members not as recipients of information but people
who can participate in different ways.
This actually follows on from the previous section more closely than you might think. [DO I
REALLY WANT TO DO THIS?].
Section 4 – What Can People Do?
[START]. I’m going to draw here on my own field of expertise, which is Web 2.0 sites. For
those of you less familiar with the term, Web 2.0 basically means websites that allow users
to contribute their own content – whether that’s by providing a public space which anyone
can write on, like Twitter or a blogging platform, or perhaps comment on other people’s
content, like Facebook, or even collaboratively edit content, like Wikipedia. For our
purposes today, there’s a few interesting things about Web 2.0 sites. For a start, these sites
provide ‘natural data’, much like a museum – you can observe things as they happen in real
time. In the case of some of these sites, like Facebook, you can get a lot of natural data.
And you can get it without even leaving your office, or even your bed. The other point that
makes them obviously relevant to this section is that, as these sort of sites by definition
make user interaction possible, we can study a variety of audience behaviours on these sites
[LINK TO PREVIOUS SECTION?]. And the third point is that they produce a lot of both
optimism and pessimism about their [WHATS], which social research can help to
[disentangle].
So what sort of things do audiences do on Web 2.0 sites, and how can we go about studying
them? Well let’s start with the basic one, but one that can get forgotten amidst all the
excitement of the new technology. And that’s just plain simple reading (or watching, or
listening, or similar). [MORE HERE].
One thing science communicators are often interested in is what the audience is actually
learning from their efforts. One thing you’ll often hear is this worry that audiences
‘misunderstand’ the science that’s being communicated. So an audience will see ‘new drug
shows some signs of success in animal trials’ and read it as ‘Alzheimers’ cure discovered’.
This causes particular concern when that audience is a journalist who’s going on to spread
the message on further, but I’m not going to address that problem here (though happy to
take questions about it). Anyway, here I’d suggest thinking about the encoding/decoding
idea. One of the key things this theory does is suggest that we shouldn’t think purely in
binary terms of understanding/misunderstanding. Instead we can acknowledge that a single
message can, and will, inevitably be ‘decoded’ in lots of different ways depending on the
audience’s past knowledge, background, experiences, interests, etc. Research following on
from this start point can try to establish how these background factors can inform different
learning outcomes.
Why is Web 2.0 useful here? [Who’s heard of MOOCs?]. Well from these you can get a lot
of information about users as they embark on the MOOC, you can track their progress and
activities, and see their final learning outcomes. You can even design MOOCs to [WHAT].
For instance, you can ensure that the final learning assessments are sufficiently broad as to
show a range of learning outcomes. Some of the best-resourced MOOCs even build in
software that tracks the eye and hand movements of users as they carry out the learning
activities. Obviously when you study MOOCs you’re generally studying a fairly specific and
self-selecting population, and none of this can replace spending extended periods of time in
a classroom with students. But [FINISH].
Alternatively, perhaps you’re more interested in how audiences read material from a variety
of sites, following links posted on Facebook to a blog post which they read alongside a
Wikipedia article – that media convergence I talked about earlier. Perhaps you’re worried
about this idea of online ‘echo chambers’, where people only encounter material which
presents ideas they already agree with. Again, the online setting presents tools you can use
to investigate that if you know how. For instance, applications like ‘SimilarWeb’ allows you
to see what links bring people to a website, and what links people follow out of a website,
how long people actually spend on the page – so are they reading, or just passing through –
and so on. As with any application, you can’t 100% trust the results, and different
applications will give you somewhat different results [thing about word count]. [Joke about
my own blog]. [FINISH OFF].
Let’s think of another thing that audiences can do on Web 2.0 sites, and that’s commenting
on other people’s posts. And this is a crucial part of the basic infrastructure of a lot of Web
2.0 sites, from Facebook, to reddit, to millions of niche forums. [One can even think of
hashtags on Twitter as a form of commenting] [MORE HERE - CONVERSATIONS].
Let’s think about this using the framework of ‘public engagement with science’. So recall
that this suggests we need to see science communication as a dialogue between specialists
and non-specialists, rather than a one-way flow of information. From that point of view, the
possibility of mass online conversations between professional scientists, policymakers, and a
variety of other audiences is quite an exciting one. Recall also that I suggested much of this
public engagement idea is focussed on political issues. I’d argue that’s a theme you see
quite strongly in ongoing research into science communication on the internet. [POLITICAL
BLOGS GET MORE DISCUSSION STUFF HERE?]. For instance, the growing field of ‘issues
mapping’ tracks the use of key words, often controversial terms like ‘fracking’ or ‘genetic
modification’, as they appear in various online conversations. [EXAMPLES]. Indeed one of
the leading researchers in this field, Noortje Marres, has argued that this [WHAT] should
encourage us to completely re-consider how we think of public groups. She argues that
we’re used to saying that certain groups rally around a particular issue – so, for example,
[EXAMPLE]. But she says that’s the wrong way round. It’s the issues that create public
groups – it’s more useful [FINISH OFF].
So that’s the view from the politically-minded engagement people. But what about the
more everyday, social stuff? What might scholars like Sarah Davies, who are interested in
questions of [WHAT] say about Web 2.0? Well, there’s not much specific research around
these questions [JOKE], but we can certainly draw on other social research into internet
commenting. The first thing to say here is that there sometimes seems to be a bit of stigma
around commenting. [Have they heard of lurking?]. I’ve lost count of the number of people
who’ve said to me ‘well I’m on Twitter but I don’t Tweet’ in guilty tones, followed by ‘I
should really Tweet some more’. [Thank those people and ask them not to Tweet some
more]. Anyway, some fairly extensive studies have been conducted on ‘lurking’ by Blair
Nonnecke and Jenny Preece. You’ll notice I said ‘lurking’ rather than ‘lurkers’, because their
first argument is that it’s more useful to see lurking as a kind of behaviour rather than a kind
of person. The same people might well lurk on one site while being an active commenter on
another, depending on how comfortable they feel with the other people on the website,
how comfortable they are with the general style and tone of discussion, and so forth.
There are some obvious ways in which that might play a role in conversations within
science-based Web 2.0 sites. For instance, the level of technical terminology. One of the
sites I’ve studied is r/AskScience, and it’s a place for people to come and ask science
questions of more expert users. [INTRODUCE MEME]. On the other hand some might argue
sites like these play a valuable role in science communication, [WHY]. But, again, levels of
expertise are not the only question. Another site I study is the Facebook group [apologies] I
Fucking Love Science . This site does not use technical terminology, or require high levels of
expertise. But conversations can often get partisan to the point of aggressive. Some of
these are just random insults, known as trolling [Morag]. But some of them are more
specific to science conversations. For instance, on IFLS, saying anything which comes across
as pro-religion or anti-vaccines is bound to attract an instant attack. [FINISH OFF inc. many
more likes/upvotes than comments].
Moving further up the scale of involvement, one final audience activity I’d like to consider is,
to borrow a term from the media studies scholar Axel Bruns, the idea of ‘produsage’. [Who
knows it?]. The idea is that many modern technologies, including web 2.0 sites, help to
collapse the barriers between those who produce media and those who consume it. So
audiences can also become producers, much more easily than in the past. Previously if you
wanted to write for a wide audience you had to have some form of publisher or publication,
if you wanted to broadcast good video or audio you needed high-end technology, and so
forth. But with blogs, youtube, podcast sites, and so forth, keen amateurs can actually
produce material which comes to rival more traditionally-produced content. So to think
more specifically about science communication, blog platforms have allowed people who
have previously fumed at mass media representations of science – most notably,
professional scientists – to write alternative accounts. The science communication
researcher, and former science journalist, Brian Trench has referred to this ability for
audiences to completely bypass mass media gatekeepers as “turning science
communication inside-out”. [STATISTICS ON CONSUMPTION]. For even more extreme
examples, both IFLS and the hugely popular YouTube channel ASAPScience were both
created by people with no professional background in either science or science
communication – both started out as hobbies which expanded quite considerably. IFLS, for
instance, has 20 million subscribers on Facebook (for comparison, the Facebook page for
Fox News has 10 million).
[START]. However [WHAT]. A former sociologist of science and now freelance science
writer Alice Bell has analysed the claim made by [WHO] David "Science Blogs Is a High
School Clique, Nature Network Is a Private Club" – in other words [WHAT]. Bell’s conclusion
is that the evidence is inconclusive, though later work by Karen Bultitude and Matthew
Ranger has suggested that many of the most popular science bloggers do have an imaginary
audience in mind, and it’s “the kind of mildly curious sort of science interested person like
me”.
CONCLUSION – 21ST CENTURY TECHNOLOGIES HAVEN’T GIVEN US NEW AUDIENCES.