August 7, 2008
Category: Framing Science
This blog has a ton of readers from the Madison, Wisconsin area. It's not surprising given that the university town is a major international hub for interest in science communication and public affairs.
For Madison-area readers, tonight offers a great opportunity to discuss first hand many of the research principles and arguments that have been made here at Framing Science. My colleague Dietram Scheufele will be giving a presentation titled "Does Science Have a Marketing Problem? The Convergence of Science, Policy & Communication."
Scheufele is a professor of Life Sciences Communication at Wisconsin and co-authored with me last year's cover article at The Scientist magazine (PDF). Details are below. If you can make the presentation and discussion, I can guarantee you it will be well worth it. And following the talk, feel free to log on and leave your thoughts in this comment space.
UW Life Sciences Communication Forum
Special Interests
Lecture series, "Does Science Have a Marketing Problem? The Convergence of Science, Policy & Communication," by Prof. Dietram Scheufele
When: 08/07/08 @ 7:00pm
Cost: Room 1100
Call: 262-1464
Web: www.dietramscheufele.com/sforumsch.pdf
Email: scheufele@wisc.edu
More Information:
Summer 2008
Tuesday/Thursday
7:00-8pm
1100 Grainger
Google co-founder Larry Page last year bluntly told scientists that they have "a serious marketing problem." While his keynote speech was meant to be provocative his point is well taken. Scientistsoften have a hard time connecting with the general public about the importance of their findings and their relevance for their everyday lives. And this gap widens as new technologies raise ethical, legal, and societal questions for which we have no easy answers. How do we balance the sanctity of life with the great promise of stem cell research? Does the economic and scientific potential of nanotechnology outweigh potential unknown risks? And how can scientists get their information across in public discourse without engaging in public relations wars with interest groups or partisan players in the policy arena?
These issues are not trivial ones. Many citizens look at emerging technologies, such as stem cell research or nanotechnology, as much more than scientific issues. In fact, emerging technologies often have social, legal and ethical implications that many citizens see as much more important than scientific aspects when forming attitudes about science policy and funding. Unfortunately, scientists all too often reject such concerns as irrelevant to the scientific debate and blame them on a lack of understanding of the technical and regulatory facts related to nanotech.
This forum brings together bloggers, scientists, journalists, and social scientists to brainstorm solutions to the marketing problem Larry Page talked about. We will hear from people in policy, media, and academe about campaigns and outreach efforts that worked, issues that remain unresolved, and broader implications for Wisconsin and beyond.
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 10:38 AM • 1 Comments • View blog reactions
August 1, 2008
Category: 2008 Election
You knew this was coming. For most Americans, this latest advertisement from McCain attacking Obama will be seen as deep irony, morphing Obama's political celebrity into a matter of audacious vanity and narcissism. But for many Evangelicals, there is probably a second meaning to this ad. Indeed, the signal is not just one of vanity, but one playing on the theme of Obama as anti-Christ. Not only is he not one of us, but his coming should invoke Biblical fear. See for yourself above.
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 2:39 PM • 13 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Blogging/New Media
I may not generate the type of ideologically-intense traffic of a PZ Myers, but when it comes to influence, Framing Science continues its steady ascent. According to Wikio's latest rankings, this site climbed one spot during the month of July to #14 among science-related blogs (#11 if you go by Greg Laden's count.)
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 2:13 PM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: 2008 Election
With the election in full swing, the Fall semester is shaping up to be an exciting time here at American University in Washington, DC. In fact, in recently released national rankings, The Princeton Review named AU as the the "most politically active" campus in the country, as #13 in terms of quality of life, and Washington, DC as a "top 5" college town.
In its profile on AU, The Princeton Review quotes extensively from students. Their comments include, "This school lives, breathes, eats, and sleeps politics," a club exists "for just about every type of person you can think of," because of the school's location, politics "infect the campus." "Watching CNN" and "working on the Hill" are everyday activities for many students and "Social justice and community-service groups" are also "very popular."
Among the 15 graduate students I had last Fall in my course on communication theory, two are now working as senior communication staffers for the Obama campaign, another joined the communication staff at the National Academies, and a fourth was just named Communication Director for a Congressman. Others have moved on to jobs at public affairs strategy firms or public interest organizations.
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 1:55 PM • 0 Comments • View blog reactions
July 31, 2008
Category: Global Warming
That's the question raised by National Post columnist Vanessa Farquharson. While male writers and bloggers focus on a Pandora's box of looming catastrophe, a storyline that likely leads to a sense of fatalism, female writers and bloggers focus more on practical adaptation and mitigation strategies that citizens can start doing today:
"...It's interesting to note that, for whatever reason, most of the voices behind this apocalyptic panic are male. But a growing collective of female bloggers are now writing about peak oil, more often in the context of how many strawberries we should dehydrate in order to be prepared for a crisis, and whether or not stocking up on brown rice is considered hoarding...
...Astyk [a female blogger] believes that if we keep focusing on predictions, models and hypotheses about peak oil, we're missing the point.
"Simply learning that we're in the midst of something very difficult is not the end of it," she says. "Learning about peak oil doesn't stop with 'We're doomed.' We're not doomed -- we're just facing very difficult times, and the way we face them will determine whether they're just hard or disastrous for us. There's an enormous amount of mitigation we can do, both on the community level and at the political level."
After expressing these sentiments on her blog, Astyk's readers responded in droves. One of them, Deanna Duke, ended up writing her own post about the topic on Crunchy Chicken, a green blog with a mostly female readership.
"Why does it seem like there's a strong gender difference in how people react to the coming energy crisis?" she asked. "I've heard many complaints [from readers] about the whole prediction that peak oil equals social and economic Armageddon ... But of the women writing about peak oil, the predictions are more metered and the conversation mostly revolves around preparation.
"I find it similar in concept to that whole 'nesting' period right before a woman gives birth," she adds. "It's like, instinctually, women know some trauma is coming and need to prepare by making the home comfortable and clean and storing up food and supplies. Nothing panicky, just getting things done."
What do readers think? Are men more likely to focus on catastrophe while women more likely to emphasize practical things that citizens can do to cope with the problem?
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 11:23 AM • 4 Comments • View blog reactions
Category: Global Warming
From Canada's The National Post:
Faced with an unflattering image as a global environmental disaster area, the oil sands sector is stepping up its offensive to counteract critics. The sector has re-branded the Oil Sands Developers Group, a Fort McMurraybased coalition of 28 companies developing the business, and put forward its president, Don Thompson, to get out the message that reality on the ground is different from that portrayed by green groups and others who want development stopped...
...Negative perceptions of the oil sands as a big engine of global warming have resulted in a series of U. S. policies to discourage their use. That, too, has been blown out of proportion, Mr. Thompson said. The oil sands account for 4% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, while Canada's emissions are 2% of the world's total. "We have not been communicating enough with our key public," he acknowledged. "That is something that we want to change. We want to reengage and understand all the issues that people have with the oil sands
and we want to make changes where they are required to ensure we have dealt with issues."
According to the article, main points of emphasis in the campaign will include:
The air quality in Fort McMurray is as good as anywhere in Alberta - Oil sands companies employ 1,500 aboriginals and have awarded aboriginal enterprises $2-billion in contracts - The oil sands account for only 4% of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions - Oil sands mining operations affect 0.01% of the boreal forest - Projects to improve roads and bridges worth $600-million are under way right now in Fort McMurray - Two new subdivisions, each with the potential to house 20,000 people, are under construction.
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 11:06 AM • 2 Comments • View blog reactions
July 30, 2008
Category: 2008 Election
Sigh. Ugh. Damn! That was my reaction when I heard about the brewing allegations that John Edwards had cheated on his sick wife and had fathered a love child. My reaction was not because of disappointment in Edwards. I personally don't think affairs reveal that much about the qualities that make for a strong president. Nor am I really that surprised when powerful men driven by fame and ambition cheat on their wives. I suspect it's a temptation that is in most elected officials' DNA, republican or democrat.
But rather, my reaction was in anticipation of what is a whisp of evidence or video or photo away from being a news tsunami, a media feeding frenzy that threatens to dominate the airwaves during the notoriously slow news month of August. This could be big people and may end up being one of the major political and media distractions in election history.
At the Huffington Post, Lee Stranahan summarizes the variables that are coming together to make this story irresistible to the mainstream press, especially cable news, but even to the investigative units of the NY Times, LA Times, and other major newspapers.
Here are some of what Stranahan reviews as potential news angles ripe for 24 hour coverage:
Despite what some people are going to say, this is news. A former Senator and Vice Presidential candidate who was running for President less than six months ago and is now on the short list for Vice President has an [sic] long affair during the campaign and fathers a child, covers it up, and then is caught at a hotel with the mother of the child. News! Oh -- and his wife made regular appearances on the campaign trail and has been diagnosed with cancer....
...This isn't a Mike Gravel affair. (Sorry to put that image in your head.) John Edwards been the conscience of the Democratic Party this primary season and a compelling presence speaking out on the growing gap between rich and poor. If he wasn't going to be Vice President, most Democrats wanted him somewhere in an Obama cabinet....
....Will the affair change the way we look back on the primary? Why did Edwards drop out of the race so quickly? Why did Edwards not endorse anyone until his endorsement was a moot point? Endless debates will ensue....
DNA! The press loves any story with DNA. Drama! DNA test refusals. Acceptance. Test goes out. What will happen? It's like Montel Williams but it takes weeks!
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 10:05 AM • 5 Comments • View blog reactions
July 24, 2008
Category: 2008 Election
As I like to say, when it comes to science debates, the public is far more likely to be miserly in reaching a judgment than fully informed. Most citizens are cognitive misers relying heavily on information short cuts and heuristics to make up their minds about a science controversy, often in the absence of knowledge. The fragmented nature of our modern media system magnifies the problem of a miserly public, introducing the "problem of choice." Absent a strong preference for the really good science coverage available, citizens can completely avoid such information, paying attention instead to just entertainment media or their preferred ideological source of news.
As a result, in order to effectively engage the public, scientists and their organizations need to adapt their communication efforts to the realities of human nature and the media system. This means recasting, or "framing," their communication efforts in a way that remain consistent with the science, but that connects a complex science issue to something that the intended audience already understands or values. (For more, see this recently completed book chapter, The Scientist cover article, the essay at Science, and this journal study.)
I didn't invent these principles, I adapted them from more than sixty years of research in political communication and public opinion, applying them to science debates. In this context, when it comes to understanding what makes for effective communication strategy, there is nothing essentially unique about science from election campaigns or other political skirmishes.
The Washington Post, in an article today, spotlights this rich body of research in the social sciences, interviewing various political scientists who have been tracking levels of political knowledge in the electorate. As they note, levels of political knowledge were very low in the 1950s and they remain so today, despite increased levels of education and orders of magnitude increases in the availability of political news and information.
One of the political scientists I often cite is Samuel Popkin, author of the seminal The Reasoning Voter. He argues that in many cases it is quite rational for citizens to cut down on their information costs by relying heavily on character cues, ideology, and other heuristics in reaching judgments about politics. As a result, effective political strategists and candidates understand how to adapt their message to this reality. Here's what Popkin has to say in the WPost article:
How much credit do we give our most precious resource, the American brain? Is it half-empty or half-full? Americans "don't sound the way the high priests of culture want them to sound," says Samuel L. Popkin, author of "The Reasoning Voter," who tends to give voters more credit rather than less. "They use their own language. They process a lot more than they can recall in interviews. They have a lot better sense of who's on their side and who isn't than they're often given credit for."
Four other political scientists review this aspect of human nature and public opinion in a new book titled "The American Voter Revisited." As the WPost article recounts:
Four years ago, Lewis-Beck and Jacoby and two other political scientists decided to take on "The American Voter" once more. They used the same methods to crunch the data and even organized the book the same way. (They had to eliminate the chapter on the agrarian vote, though, because there aren't enough farmers left anymore for a usable sample.)
"The American Voter Revisited" is chock-full of depressing conclusions, couched in academic understatement. In-depth interviews conducted with 1,500 people during the two most recent presidential elections revealed that the "majority of people don't have many issues in mind" when they discuss voting, Lewis-Beck says. Sometimes they say they're attracted to a candidate because "I just don't think we should change parties right now." They tend to inherit their party allegiance from their parents, and those beliefs tend to stay fixed throughout their lives, he says.
"For many people," the authors of "Revisited" write, "dealing with political issues is too much of a bother."
"If they know they're Republican and have been happy that way, they'll stay Republican," says another of the book's four authors, Herb Weisberg, who chairs the political science department at Ohio State University. Even for those voters who do rethink their allegiance to a given party -- because, say, the party in power has fouled things up -- "if times get better, they'll get back to where they were," Weisberg says. Their attachment to party is more emotional than intellectual, Lewis-Beck suggests, akin to their feelings for sports teams.
Posted by Matthew C. Nisbet at 9:19 AM • 3 Comments • View blog reactions
