Tag: journalism

The travails of science communication

There’s an interesting phenomenon in the world of science communication, at least so far as I’ve noticed. Every once in a while, there comes along a concept that is gaining in research traction worldwide but is quite tricky to explain in simple terms to the layman.

Earlier this year, one such concept was the Higgs mechanism. Between December 13, 2011, when the first spotting of the Higgs boson was announced, and July 4, 2012, when the spotting was confirmed as being the piquingly-named “God particle”, the use of the phrase “cosmic molasses” was prevalent enough to prompt an annoyed (and struggling-to-make-sense) Daniel Sarewitz to hit back on Nature. While the article had a lot to say, and a lot more waiting there to just to be rebutted, it did include this remark:

If you find the idea of a cosmic molasses that imparts mass to invisible elementary particles more convincing than a sea of milk that imparts immortality to the Hindu gods, then surely it’s not because one image is inherently more credible and more ‘scientific’ than the other. Both images sound a bit ridiculous. But people raised to believe that physicists are more reliable than Hindu priests will prefer molasses to milk. For those who cannot follow the mathematics, belief in the Higgs is an act of faith, not of rationality.

Sarewitz is not wrong in remarking of the problem as such, but in attempting to use it to define the case of religion’s existence. Anyway: In bridging the gap between advanced physics, which is well-poised to “unlock the future”, and public understanding, which is well-poised to fund the future, there is good journalism. But does it have to come with the twisting and turning of complex theory, maintaining only a tenuous relationship between what the metaphor implies and what reality is?

The notion of a “cosmic molasses” isn’t that bad; it does get close to the original idea of a pervading field of energy whose forces are encapsulated under certain circumstances to impart mass to trespassing particles in the form of the Higgs boson. Even this is a “corruption”, I’m sure. But what I choose to include or leave out makes all the difference.

The significance of experimental physicists having probably found the Higgs boson is best conveyed in terms of what it means to the layman in terms of his daily life and such activities more so than trying continuously to get him interested in the Large Hadron Collider. Common, underlying curiosities will suffice to to get one thinking about the nature of God, or the origins of the universe, and where the mass came from that bounced off Sir Isaac’s head. Shrouding it in a cloud of unrelated concepts is only bound to make the physicists themselves sound defensive, as if they’re struggling to explain something that only they will ever understand.

In the process, if the communicator has left out things such as electroweak symmetry-breaking and Nambu-Goldstone bosons, it’s OK. They’re not part of what makes the find significant for the layman. If, however, you feel that you need to explain everything, then change the question that your post is answering, or merge it with your original idea, etc. Do not indulge in the subject, and make sure to explain your concepts as a proper fiction-story: Your knowledge of the plot shouldn’t interfere with the reader’s process of discovery.

Another complex theory that’s doing the rounds these days is that of quantum entanglement. Those publications that cover news in the field regularly, such as R&D mag, don’t even do as much justice as did SciAm to the Higgs mechanism (through the “cosmic molasses” metaphor). Consider, for instance, this explanation from a story that appeared on November 16.

Electrons have a property called “spin”: Just as a bar magnet can point up or down, so too can the spin of an electron. When electrons become entangled, their spins mirror each other.

The causal link has been omitted! If the story has set out to explain an application of quantum entanglement, which I think it has, then it has done a fairly good job. But what about entanglement-the-concept itself? Yes, it does stand to lose a lot because many communicators seem to be divesting of its intricacies and spending more time explaining why it’s increasing in relevance in modern electronics and computation. If relevance is to mean anything, then debate has to exist – even if it seems antithetical to the deployment of the technology as in the case of nuclear power.

Without understanding what entanglement means, there can be no informed recognition of its wonderful capabilities, there can be no public dialog as to its optimum use to further public interests. When when scientific research stops contributing to the latter, it will definitely face collapse, and that’s the function, rather the purpose, that sensible science communication serves.

Plotting a technological history of journalism

Electric telegraph

  • July 27, 1866 – SS Great Eastern completes laying of Transatlantic telegraphic cables
  • By 1852, miles of American telegraphic wires had grown from 40 in 1846 to 23,000
  • In 1849-1869, telegraphic mileage had increased by 108,000 miles

Cost of information transmission fell with its increasing ubiquity as well as instantization of global communication.

  • Usefulness of information was preserved through transmission-time, increasing its shelf-life, making production of information a significant task
  • Led to a boost in trade as well

Advent of war – especially political turmoil in Europe and the American Civil War – pushed rapid developments in its technology.

These last mentioned events led to establishment of journalism as a recognized profession

  • Because it focused finally on locating and defining local information,
  • Because transmission of information could now be secured through other means,
  • And prompted newspaper establishments to install information-transmission services of their own –
  • Leading to proliferation of competition and an emphasis on increase of the quality of reportage

The advent of the electric telegraph, a harbinger of the “small world” phenomenon, did not contribute to the refinement of journalistic genres as much as it helped establish them.

In the same period, rather from 1830 to 1870, significant political events that transpired alongside the evolution of communication, and were revolutionized by it, too, included the rapid urbanization in the USA and Great Britain (as a result of industrialization), the Belgian revolution, the first Opium War, the July revolution, the Don Pacifico affair, and the November uprising.

Other notable events include the laying of the Raleigh-Gaston railroad in North Carolina and advent of the first steam locomotives in England. Essentially, the world was ready to receive its first specialized story-tellers.

Photography

Picture on the web from mousebilenadam

Photography developed from the mid-19th century onward. While it did not have as drastic an impact as did the electric telegraph, it has instead been undergoing a slew of changes the impetus of which comes from technological advancement. While black-and-white photography was prevalent for quite a while, it was color photography that refocused interested in using the technology to augment story-telling.

  • Using photography to tell a story involves a trade-off between neutrality and subjective opinions
  • A photographer, in capturing his subject, first identifies the subject such that it encapsulates emotions that he is looking for

Photography establishes a relationship between some knowledge of some reality and prevents interpretations from taking any other shape:

  • As such a mode of story-telling, it is a powerful tool only when the right to do so is well-exercised, and there is no given way of determining that absolutely
  • Through a lens is a powerful way to capture socio-history, and this preserve it in a columbarium of other such events, creating, in a manner of speaking, something akin to Asimov’s psycho-history
  • What is true in the case of photo-journalism is only partly true in the case of print-based story-telling

Photography led to the establishment of perspectives, of the ability of mankind to preserve events as well as their connotations, imbuing new power into large-scale movements and revolutions. Without the ability to visualize connotations, adversarial journalism, and the establishment of the Fourth Estate as it were, may not be as powerful as it currently is because of its ability to provide often unambiguous evidence toward or against arguments.

  • A good birthplace of the discussion on photography’s impact on journalism is Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, On Photography.
  • Photography also furthered interest in the arts, starting with the contributions of William Talbot.

Television

Although television sets were introduced in the USA in the 1930s, a good definition of its impact came in the famous Wasteland Speech in 1961 by Newton Minow, speaking at a convention of the National Association of Broadcasters.

When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you’ll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

It is this space, the “vast wasteland”, upon the occupation of which came journalism and television together to redefine news-delivery.

It is a powerful tool for the promotion of socio-political agendas: this was most effectively demonstrated during the Vietnam War during which, as Michael Mandelbaum wrote in 1982,

… regular exposure to the early realities of battle is thought to have turned the public against the war, forcing the withdrawal of American troops and leaving the way clear for the eventual Communist victory.

This opinion, as expressed by then-president Lyndon Johnson, was also defended by Mandelbaum as a truism in the same work (Print Culture and Video Culture, vol. 111, no. 4, Daedalus, pp. 157-158).

In the entertainment versus informative programming debate, an important contribution was made by Neil Postman in his 1985 work Amusing Ourselves to Death, wherein he warned of the decline in humankind’s ability to communicate and share serious ideas and the role television played in this decline because of its ability to only transfer information, not interaction.

Watch here…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRabb6_Gr2Y?rel=0]

And continued here…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHd31L6XPEQ?rel=0]

.

Arguing along similar veins in his landmark speech in 1990 at a computer science meeting in Germany, Postman said,

Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that, for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

In his conclusion, he blamed television for severing the tie between information and action.

The advent of the television also played a significant role in American feminism.

Credibility on the web

There are a finite number of sources from which anyone receives information. The most prominent among them are media houses (incl. newspapers, news channels, radio stations, etc.) and scientific journals (at least w.r.t. the subjects I work with).

Seen one way, these establishments generate the information that we receive. Without them, stories would remain localized, centralized, away from the ears that could accord them gravity.

Seen another way, these establishments are also motors: sans their motive force, information wouldn’t move around as it does, although this is assuming that they don’t mess with the information itself.

With more such “motors” in the media mix, the second perspective is becoming the norm of things. Even if information isn’t picked up by one house, it could be set sailing through a blog or a CJ initiative. The means through which we learn something, or stumble upon it for that matter, are growing to be more overlapped, lines crossing each others’ paths more often.

Veritably, it’s a maze. In such a labyrinthine setup, the entity that stands to lose the most is faith of a reader/viewer/consumer in the credibility of the information received.

In many cases, with a more interconnected web – the largest “supermotor” – the credibility of one bit of information is checked in one location, by one entity. Then, as it moves around, all following entities inherit that credibility-check.

For instance, on Wikipedia, credibility is established by citing news websites, newspaper/magazine articles, journals, etc. Jimmy Wales’ enterprise doesn’t have its own process of verification in place. Sure, there are volunteers who almost constantly police its millions of pages, but all they can do is check if the citation is valid, and if there are any contrarious reports, too, to the claims being staked.

One way or another, if a statement has appeared in a publication, it can be used to have the reader infer a fact.

In this case, Wikipedia has inherited the credibility established by another entity. If the verification process had failed in the first place, the error would’ve been perpetrated by different motors, each borrowing from the credibility of the first.

Moreover, the more strata that the information percolates through, the harder it will be to establish a chain of accountability.

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My largest sources of information are:

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Journals
  3. Newspapers
  4. Blogs

(The social media is just a popular aggregator of news from these sources.)

Wikipedia cites news reports and journal articles.

News reports are compiled with the combined efforts of reporters and editors. Reporters verify the information they receive by checking if it’s repeated by different sources under (if possible) different circumstances. Editors proofread the copy and are (or must remain) sensitive to factual inconsistencies.

Journals have the notorious peer-reviewing mechanism. Each paper is subject to a thorough verification process intended to wean out all mistakes, errors, information “created” by lapses in the scientific method, and statistical manipulations and misinterpretations.

Blogs borrow from such sources and others.

Notice: Even in describing the passage of information through these ducts, I’ve vouched for reporters, editors, and peer-reviews. What if they fail me? How would I find out?

*

The point of this post was to illustrate

  1. The onerous yet mandatory responsibility that verifiers of information must assume,
  2. That there aren’t enough of them, and
  3. That there isn’t a mechanism in place that periodically verifies the credibility of some information across its lifetime.

How would you ensure the credibility of all the information you receive?

The post-reporter era

One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances attached to it. There are ethical and moral issues, technical considerations, writing styles, and presentation formats to perfect. The entire news-publishing industry is centered on the activities of reporters and streamlining them.

What the reporter requires the most is… well, a few things. The first is a domain of events, from which he picks issues to talk about. The second is a domain of stories, into which he publishes his reports. The third is a platform using which he may incentivize this process for himself, and acquire the tools with which he may publish his stories efficiently and effectively. The last entity is more commonly understood in the form of a publishing house.

The reason I’ve broken the working of a reporter into these categories is to understand what makes a reporter at all. Today, a reporter is most commonly understood in terms of an individual who is employed with a publishing house and publishes stories for them. Ideally, however, everyone is a reporter: simply the creation of knowledge by people based on experiences around them should be qualification enough. This calls into question the role of a publishing house: is it a platform working with which reporters may function efficiently, or is it an employer of reporters?

If it’s an employer of reporters, then any publishing house wouldn’t have to worry about where the course of journalism is going to take the organization itself. Reporters will have to change the way they work – how they spot issues, evolving writing styles to suit their audiences, so forth – but the publishing house will retain ownership of the reporters themselves. As long as it’s not a platform which individuals use to function as reporters, things are going to be fine.

Now, let’s move to the post-reporter era, where everyone is a reporter (of course, that’s an idealized image, but even so). In this world, a reporter is not someone who works for a publishing house – that aspect of the word’s meaning is left behind in the age of the publishing house. In this world, a reporter is someone who works simply as a messenger between the domains of events and stories, where the role of the publishing house as the owner of reportage is absent.

The nature of such a world throws light on the valuation of information. When multiple reporters cover different events and return to HQ to file their stories, the house decides which stories make the cut and which don’t on the basis of a set of parameters. In other words, the house creates and assigns a particular value to each story, and then compares the values of different stories to determine their destiny.

In the post-reporter era, which is likely to be occupied by channels of individual presentation – ranging from word-of-mouth to full-scale websites – houses that thrive today on the valuation of information and the importance the houses’ readers place on it  will steadily fade out. What exists will be an all-encompassing form of what is known as citizen journalism (CJ) today. Houses take to CJ because of the mutually beneficial relationship available therein: the CJ gets the coverage and the advantage of the issue pursued no longer being under wraps; the reporter gets a story that has both civic/criminal and human-interest angles to it.

However, when the CJ voids the relationship by refusing the intervention of a publishing/broadcasting house, and chooses to take his story straight to the people through a channel he finds effective enough, the house-level valuation of stories is replaced by a democratic institution that may or may not be guided by a paternalistic attitude.

Therefore, if a particular house has to survive into the post-reporter era, it must discard issue-valuation as an engine and instead rely on some other entity, such as one represented by a parameter whose efficiency is a maximizable quantity. This can be conceived as a fourth domain which, upon maximization, becomes the superset of which the three domains are subsets.

A counter-productive entity in this situation is that of property, which is accrued in great quantities by a high-achieving house in the present but which delays the onset of change in the future. Even when the house starts to experience slightly rougher weather, its first move will be to pump in more money, thereby offsetting change by some time. Only when the amount of property invested in delaying change is considerable will the house start to consider other alternatives, by which time other competing organizations will have moved into the future.