“We have to be realistic about the impact that communication can have on political realities. Communication, action and activism is where we need to locate our efforts.” Prof. Andy Miah on the limits of science communication.
This week’s guest on the Research Comms podcast is Professor Andy Miah - Chair in Science Communication and Future Media at the University of Salford. In our conversation we discuss how best to engage people with unfamiliar technological advances, why it’s so important for all academics and researchers to have some kind of a public presence, as well as delving into what Prof. Miah means when he says that we’re undergoing a crisis of science communication.
The below interview has been edited and condensed for the sake of brevity and space. To hear the full interview check out the podcast!
The work that you're doing is very eclectic, covering everything from science and science communication, to philosophy, sports, e-sports and ethics. How would you describe what you do?
For me it's always been about trying to think about the complicated questions that we face as a result of technological change.
It's always interested me how we are confronted with new realities as a result of new discoveries. I did an undergraduate degree in sports science, where I was around a lot of people who were trying to help elite athletes push the boundaries of human capability. I've always thought of athletes as the pioneers of the next iteration of human evolution.
So for me sports was a platform into the human enhancement technologies and it spawned a real interest and fascination into how we're being changed.
Everything I do is connected by this thread of technological change and wrestling with the complexity of these modern problems that, ultimately, we have no clue how to deal with.
What can the scientific community be doing better to engage with the public on contentious scientific issues?
I think there's a degree of naivety within the scientific community about this. They don’t seem to think that their contribution will have anything other than the impact that they expect - the idea being that ‘as long as we can get all the science out there, people will understand why we need to do a certain thing’. I think that’s just not true.
I'm consistently disappointed that the wonderful comedic satirists that we have around us seem almost ineffective in preventing a situation where we have political leaders that are running riot and essentially making a mockery of democracy.
But also we've had satire for centuries, arguably. So we have to be realistic about the impact that communication can have on political realities. That's where we need to shift, not just away from the idea that communication in itself is all we need to do, but to the idea that communication, action, and activism is where we need to locate our efforts.
I’ve been moved seeing things like the March For Science, which grew in popularity in the last few years. I think it was especially spawned by the Trump administration, where you had concerns about the freedom of scientists to speak openly about things like climate change or indeed the removal of data from the White House website about climate change.
I think those are the barometers that tell us whether we're in good shape or not. It's less about evidencing the impact on the public, and more about whether you can show that your society is able to ensure the freedom of speech to express ideas. I think we need to move away from the principle that just by communicating we're going to bring about change, because there's so much more going on.
I think it's the idea of change being possible that we have to get across. It's not so much that as long as we do it then everything's going to be better, but things are going to be far worse if we're not able to do it.
That is why a lot of my time is spent supporting colleagues and trying to encourage young aspiring students to be publicly present within their own lives. I want them to embrace the idea that there's no exact point that you need to wait for to have the confidence to express your views and to be publicly present within conversations.
Qualifications don't determine your right to speak about science and evidence and to talk about it in a sensible and coherent way. The biggest barrier is people feeling confident enough to do that.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
As communicators we have an array of digital tools available to help us engage with people. I’ve seen you speaking recently about a new virtual reality called Spatial. What’s that about?
The platform Spatial, which is still just getting off the ground in terms of it’s mainstream application, is a place in which you can be publicly present with a number of other people.
You can see not just their avatars but their faces, and you can curate a space that then becomes either a classroom, a meeting room, or whatever you want it to be.
I've been very excited about virtual reality for the last seven or eight years. I've seen such a remarkable amount of change in that world, and with each iteration of virtual reality there's something new that's all the more surprising.
One of the most recent things was the change from needing controllers to operate within the space, to now just using your hands. So it's becoming increasingly immersive and increasingly social.
I think that we're on the cusp of making these sorts of experiences much more available to people. It's always interesting with emerging technologies, because you realise that when they are new you have a few people that have access to it and everyone else is just looking at it and salivating.
We had a science communication event as part of Cheltenham Science Festival last year in the UK, and we brought a virtual reality demo to the event, and there was an eighty year old gentleman who tried on the virtual reality headset and he just couldn't believe what he was seeing.
As science communicators, what are some of the new technological innovations that we need to be ensuring we talk about effectively to prevent their stigmatisation?
There are so many. Just last week I saw that in South Korea they have developed an AI-backed avatar that would work as a journalist. So when you turn on your news channel, you see what looks like a human speaking, but in fact you're seeing an avatar, backed by AI, reporting the news.
Of course it's celebrated as a remarkable technological achievement. But make no mistake, this is a game changer for that industry. The idea that a deep fake video could lead people to feel that they're watching a person, but in fact are watching a graphic, is a completely transformative situation.
It has deep implications for how we think about truth as well, and what we believe we're engaging with. I think that that complete loss of reality that comes about through this technology is transformative. Great things comes with really worrying things alongside them.
We need to think about how we design artificial intelligence, how we involve people in the construction of ethical foundations for its use. On a really fundamental level, we have to wrestle with the limits that we seek to place on our species, because it's clear that the lives that we've been living are incompatible with the broader wellness and health of life on earth, and in my mind we're picking at the edges of the things that we think we have to do in order to be sustainable. But in order for the planet to be sustainable we need to think about wholesale long-term and permanent changes that are dramatically different.
We have to nurture a way of life that sees things differently, we have to show people that looking at a beautiful garden is in fact ugly, and what's beautiful is to have a garden full of food that can feed people.
That changing sense of aesthetics and value is really the heart of the work that we need to do.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
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