Public Engagement in Science

When I first arrived at the symposium, I was about 15 minutes late, so I walked into a room with a man (who I later realized was Roald Hoffman) speaking next to people moving in strange ways, almost as if they were mimicking what he was saying. At first, I thought I was in the wrong place (I have never been in the Biotechnology building before), but eventually, I realized it was all "part of the show." But reflecting on what I have learned in Comm 285, this use of actors started to get me thinking about public engagement in science. For one thing, I must admit that I would never have thought of using people to demonstrate the action of chemical bonding, though I'm not entirely sure that the point of his presentation was simply to communicate knowledge about chemical bonding. But it did make me think about the contexts in which we communicate science to the public, which affected the ways in which I viewed each poster.

The posters were all phenomenal. I especially enjoyed the poster dealing with the economics of manure, especially because in an energy hungry world, the Haber process is one of the most energy consuming things we do in society. However, when viewing the posters, something unexpected happened for me: I found myself more drawn to the posters containing a lot of text and fewer pictures. Usually, the opposite would be true, as I am a visual learner. I think part of it is my desire to learn more, coupled with my preconceived notion that more text means a more technical explanation of the topic. But it made me think of two things we have dealt with semester.

The first was Hilgartner's paper "The Dominant View of Popularization: Conceptual Problems, Political Uses." When viewing these posters and reading the text written on many, it made me wonder if what I was viewing was "genuine" scientific knowledge or if what I was viewing was a distortion of the knowledge, an alternative view of the true information viewed through someone else's perspective. Even though I felt as though I gained a better understanding of the subject matter through reading the text rather than looking at the pictures, I wondered if the knowledge I was gathering was reliable or not. After having taken Comm 285 and understanding the notion of "reliable knowledge," I felt as though the only possible way to understand the topic without someone else's view distorting the knowledge was through looking at pictures. Aside from using different angles or perspectives when capturing a picture, visual records of information usually create the "purest" form of knowledge in my opinion; it is knowledge that does not get distorted by the communicator. After viewing a photograph of a cell, for example, I gained reliable knowledge about what a cell looks like. However, when I was wondering about this, it made me think of the video we watched about the bee-eaters. In this video, I watched a hawk steal a baby bee-eater, and thought it was real. However, the way the video was merged together made it seem real, although that behavior has never been directly observed, let alone caught on film. So clearly, a picture can be altered to convey a particular message.

I viewed the symposium as the true end to my experience in Comm 285, even though I had turned in my final paper nearly a week earlier. Viewing all of these posters made me relive what I had learned in this course, and made me think about it with respect to the "real world." I think mainly what going to this symposium and being forced to think about the principles of science communication has taught me is that we should not have blind faith in science. In other words, we should not just believe everything a scientist says just because he/she is a scientist. Instead, we must always strive to be informed citizens and question what is read, said, or displayed to us, so that we might better the reliability of the knowledge we gain.