SCIENCE COMMUNICATION in SOUTH AFRICA Reflections on Current Issues
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SCIENCE COMMUNICATION IN SOUTH AFRICA IN SOUTH COMMUNICATION SCIENCE Why do we need to communicate science? Is science, with its highly specialised language and its arcane methods, too distant to be understood by the public? Is it really possible for citizens to participate meaningfully in scientific research SCIENCE projects and debate? Should scientists be mandated to engage with the public to facilitate better understanding of science? How can they best communicate their special knowledge to be intelligible? These and a plethora of related questions are COMMUNICATION being raised by researchers and politicians alike as they have become convinced that science and society need to draw nearer to one another. Once the persuasion took hold that science should open up to the public and IN SOUTH AFRICA these questions were raised, it became clear that coming up with satisfactory answers would be a complex challenge. The inaccessibility of scientific language Reflections on Current Issues and methods, due to ever increasing specialisation, is at the base of its very success. Thus, translating specialised knowledge to become understandable, interesting and relevant to various publics creates particular perils. This is exacerbated by the ongoing disruption of the public discourse through the digitisation of communication platforms. For example, the availability of medical knowledge on the internet and the immense opportunities to inform oneself about health risks via social media are undermined by the manipulable nature of this technology that does not allow its users to distinguish between credible content and misinformation. In countries around the world, scientists, policy-makers and the public have high hopes for science communication: that it may elevate its populations educationally, that it may raise the level of sound decision-making for people in their daily lives, and that it may contribute to innovation and economic well-being. This collection of current reflections gives an insight into the issues that have to Joubert & Falade Weingart, be addressed by research to reach these noble goals, for South Africa and by South Africans in particular. Edited by Peter Weingart, AFRICAN AFRICAN MINDS MINDS www.africanminds.org.za Marina Joubert & Bankole Falade SciCom book cover PRINT.indd 1 19/11/2019 7:24:00 AM SCIENCE COMMUNICATION IN SOUTH AFRICA Reflections on Current Issues Edited by Peter Weingart, Marina Joubert & Bankole Falade AFRICAN MINDS Published in 2019 by African Minds 4 Eccleston Place, Somerset West 7130, Cape Town, South Africa [email protected] www.africanminds.org.za Funding acknowledgement: This work is based on the research supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation of South Africa (grant number 93097). Any opinion, finding and conclusion or recom- mendation expressed in this material is that of the authors and the NRF does not accept any liability in this regard. This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ISBN Paper 978-1-928502-03-6 ISBN eBook 978-1-928502-04-3 ISBN ePub 978-1-928502-05-0 Orders African Minds 4 Eccleston Place, Somerset West 7130, Cape Town, South Africa [email protected] www.africanminds.org.za For orders from outside South Africa: African Books Collective PO Box 721, Oxford OX1 9EN, UK [email protected] www.africanbookscollective.com Contents 1 Introduction Peter Weingart, Marina Joubert & Bankole Falade 1 2 Why science communication? Janice Limson 19 3 Putting responsible research and innovation into practice at a local level in South Africa Penelope S. Haworth & Anne M. Dijkstra 45 4 Developing a targeted behavioural change communication strategy for a linguistically and culturally diverse community Konosoang Sobane & Wilfred Lunga 73 5 The challenge of communicating science effectively in fisheries management Doug S. Butterworth 96 6 Science and social media: Opportunities, benefits and risks Shirona Patel 109 7 The quackery virus: A preliminary analysis of pseudoscientific health messages on Twitter George Claassen 150 8 The amplification of uncertainty: The use of science in the social media by the anti-vaccination movement François van Schalkwyk 170 9 Why impact evaluation matters in science communication: Or, advancing the science of science communication Eric Allen Jensen 213 About the editors and the authors 229 iii Acknowledgement This book was made possible by and was published under the auspices of the South African Research Chair in Science Communication hosted by the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology (CREST), Stellenbosch University. We thank the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the National Research Foundation (NRF) for their generous support. iv Introduction 1Peter Weingart, Marina Joubert & Bankole Falade Why science communication? To understand the surge of activities nowadays termed ‘science communication’ one has to get a sense of the volume and speed of development of science over the last century, as well as its place in society. Science, whether measured in terms of scientists or in terms of scientific publications, has grown exponentially since the birth of modern science in the late 17th century. While this dynamic growth went unnoticed for a while, starting out from just a few adherents to the new ways of gaining knowledge, it became a subject of systematic reflection only in the middle of the 20th century when the US historian of science and father of bibliometrics famously noted that 90% of all scientists that had ever lived were alive at present (Price, 1963). Even though scientists (and engineers) had already contributed considerably to economic development during the late 19th century, their numbers and their impact on societies really began to matter politically and economically during and after the First World War. It was not until after the Second World War that science policy became a separate field of policy-making, first in the US, and then in Europe, Japan and Australia. Until then science was an activity carried out in relative isolation from the rest of society. Scientists communicated among themselves, within their discipli- nary communities and in languages that became more and more 1 SCIENCE COMMUNICATION IN SOUTH AFRICA opaque as their fields became ever more specialised. Science was, in the words of Don K. Price, exceptional in the sense that it was the only institution that received public funds without having to account for it (Price, 1965). This exceptionalism began to fade already in the mid-1950s when large technology projects – civilian nuclear power, aerospace and data processing – highlighted the economic utility of science (and technology). The first attempts at improving the ‘public understanding of science’ in the US were motivated primarily by concerns related to the Cold War: an apparent lack of STEM students threatening the effort of the country to prevail in the competition for technological leadership and the need to secure public support for the space programme. These two motives of science policy have become generalised beyond the original context, they underlie science communication policies in virtually all countries that have such policies, and they are present to this day to contribute to innovation and to secure public acceptance of public expenditures for science, as well as the implementation of new technologies. Public acceptance of expenditures for scientific research was particularly critical. The then dominant so-called ‘linear model’ of innovation stipulated that all economic innovation emerged from prior basic research, that the direction of such research was to be determined by scientists only, and that the outcome of research could not be predicted (Bush, 1945). This constellation was at the heart of the exceptionalism of science, and it was supported by the political context in which the freedom of science was to symbolise the superiority of the West. The need to secure public consent became more urgent as science budgets grew to politically visible dimensions, ultimately reaching 2–3% of GDP in the wealthier countries.1 Consequently, the general public, in the form of the electorate, had to be addressed to trust the scientific community’s decisions and to legitimate R&D expenditures. The general public had been addressed by scientists long before. 1 Cf. https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm 2 1 INTRODUCTION In fact, at the inception of modern science, scientists attempted to capture the interest and fascination of the aristocracy on which they depended for support. During the second half of the 19th century the popularisation of science almost became a separate profession. Alexander von Humboldt, addressing the educated bourgeoisie and the working class in his Kosmos Lectures, turned out to be the instigator of the first ‘science centre’avant la lettre, the Urania in Berlin. The spirit of popularisation that was very much also a spirit of enlightenment which could thrive as long as the science of the day was ‘accessible’ to the lay public, at least in principle, a condition that eroded with the increasing abstractness of concepts, language and subject matters in many fields heralded by quantum mechanics at the beginning of the 20th century (Bensaude-Vincent, 2001). The advent of ‘public understanding of science’ was thus charac- terised by a mix of motives: economic, political, legitimation