Sharing the Adventure with the Public The Value and Excitement of 'Grand Questions' of Space Science and Exploration: Summary of a Workshop (2011) / Chapter Skim
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Workshop Overview
Workshop Overview
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Christie Nicholson, journalist and online contributor for Scientific American, asked Moore how he could consider it a failure when people think about Earth "all the time now." She and other communicators explained how the public makes decisions on issues for which they have little background or understanding, like climate change, by using "information shortcuts" and "confirmation biases" to decide who to believe or not believe. During the panel discussion for Session 5, Moore initially resisted the notion that climate change is a belief-based issue -- "the data are there," he said -- but Nicholson and Andrew Lawler, a science journalist, helped him understand that it is indeed a matter of belief.
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As for the climate issue, he argued that the climate science community, as a community, should "bite the bullet" and tell the public that "we are in a fight for the hearts and minds of our own population." Washington Post science reporter Marc Kaufman's complaint about communicating with the public about the human spaceflight program, or exploration, was that he could not imagine a worse scenario than what has happened in the past 10 years. The 2003 space shuttle Columbia tragedy was followed by President George W
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Heidi B Hammel, senior research scientist and co-director of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and Lawler criticized the astronomers for ignoring the need to explain it to the public in understandable terms, thus creating unnecessary controversy.
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Billings emphasized that there "is no monolithic public" for space exploration, but rather many publics. She also is not convinced that better communications would result in increased public support, stating, "Public information, public education, public interest, public engagement, public understanding, and public support are all different social processes and phenomena, and one does not necessarily lead to another." Public participation is also different, she continued, and government agencies "tend to be resistant to true public participation in planning and policy making," but that may be the only path to "enduring public involvement." Billings believes that the space community "continually underestimates its audiences" and that it should think "more broadly and deeply about the values, functions, and meanings of space exploration and worry less about marketing the concrete benefits." She believes that the key is "public participation in exploration planning and policy making," involving "community consultations, citizen advisory boards, and policy dialogues." It would be "complicated and time-consuming" and require "power sharing," but it is a democratic approach and in keeping with President Obama's promise of "transparency, openness and participation in government." HOW TO COMMUNICATE Social Media A major theme of the workshop was the tremendous ongoing changes in traditional media, especially the decline of newspapers and the reduction in the number of print and broadcast science reporters, versus the emergence of the new social media.
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Courtesy of Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, Washington, D.C. McGregor said that people who thought they were not interested in following space missions found that they were fascinated if they could get the information in "tiny updates day by day." O'Brien provided data showing that 44 percent of people polled want more coverage of scientific news and discoveries (Figure 1)
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Storytelling, narratives, frames, and "people-izing" -- making stories more compelling by incorporating the personal stories and enthusiasm of the scientists involved -- were all techniques communicators advised would make science communication more effective. Nicholson explained that telling stories is a narrative art, and when they involve human drama "you have a slam dunk almost every time." Inspiring awe is another method, she added, citing a New York Times article in February 20103 that looked at the most emailed stories and showed they had one thing in common -- they all inspired awe, and science can do that, in her view.
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ASSESSMENTS OF NASA'S PUBLIC AFFAIRS EFFORTS Kaufman offered an unsolicited compliment that NASA public affairs "is far and away the best one I've dealt with," and while there may be problems with how some information in conveyed, he felt the agency deserved a "shout out" because it is doing a better job than most agencies.
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IMPLICATIONS OF THE NEW COMMUNICATION ERA AND HOW THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES SHOULD RESPOND In his remarks at the conclusion of the workshop, SSB chair Kennel commented that the convergence of computing and communications via the Internet and space communications at end of the 20th century has accelerated to this day. That, too, is a product of the science and technology revolution, he said, but because it changes relationships between human beings, it has the potential -- combined with science -- to produce a second enlightenment in the century we are now entering.
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