Science Communication Echo Chambers - Now What?
Echo chambers are a hot topic in the online science community of late. I recently wrote a blog post about whether science blogs are echo chambers, and that post continues to get a lot of play on Twitter and elsewhere. And then just this last weekend at #SciCommCamp, we had an “un-conference” session on “Echo Chambers” in which a group of scientists and science communicators discussed how to break out of them, so to speak.
“It is well known that when like-minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk. The same kind of echo-chamber effect can happen as people get news from various media. Liberals viewing MSNBC or reading left of-center blogs may well end up embracing liberal talking points even more firmly; conservative fans of Fox News may well react in similar fashion on the right.” – Cass R. Sunstein, New York Times
An echo chamber is generally understood in communication circles to be a bubble of like-mindedness, a situation in which for example a science communicator would be “preaching to the choir.” A related concept is the online “filter bubble” in which we are exposed predominantly to opinions like our own versus information that might challenge or broaden our worldview (e.g. Facebook thanks to Facebook’s news feed algorithms). At first glance, many science communicators react to the echo chamber effect as inherently an undesirable or bad thing. Who wants to just be preaching to the choir – that’s pointless, right? Well, it depends.
As I sat in the #SciCommCamp discussion session on echo chambers, I started to think that many science communicators react negatively to this idea, and positively to reaching a “wider” audience, without really knowing why, what it means to be in an echo chamber, how to effectively “break out” of an echo chamber or even how to recognize when one has done so.
To start, we must decide what our goals are. Whether our science communication venues (for example science Twitter handles or science blogs) are echo chambers depends on how we define echo chambers. And whether “preaching to the choir” is good or bad depends on one’s science communication goals. Cara Santa Maria (@CaraSantaMaria), host of the #TalkNerdy Podcast, made a good point during the #SciCommCamp session on echo chambers. She pointed out that many science communicators say they want to reach a wider audience, but “to what end?”
For example, let’s take this blog as an example. I talked in my science communication course today about echo chambers, and one of my students asked a very good question. She asked me how I define my audience on my own blog, and how I try to break out of the so-called science echo chamber. The thing is, I do what many other science bloggers do – I write about what I’m passionate about, and I mostly let readers come to me. I’m assuming that most people who read my blog, or my tweets, are fairly interested in science communication (but please do comment on this blog post to tell me what DOES bring you to my blog!)
Let’s say my primary blogging goal, when I’m not just writing about random things that inspire me, is to help scientists and science communicators learn about various elements of effective science communication. In that case, as long as you my reader don’t already have knowledge of everything I write about on this topic, I’m at least partly reaching my goal.
In this case, I could define my echo chamber in terms of knowledge of the concepts on which I write. If I mostly attract readers who are also science communication scholars or communicators with a rich understanding of #scioscicomm (science of #scicomm), I’m doing a very poor job of reaching outside my niche echo chamber.
But this “knowledge echo chamber” is not a very high standard, you might say. Sure, I may be leaving my readers with knowledge of concepts they didn’t have before they started reading. But what if my goal was to inspire scientists who weren’t already sold on the idea of communicating their research and talking to an audience beyond their journal-reading peers? In this case, I might fare far worse in terms of reaching beyond my theoretical echo chamber. There might indeed be ways to inspire new science communicators in the ranks of scientists who don’t already see the value of blogging and tweeting and writing for a non-expert audience. However, blogging and letting my audience come to me via social media probably isn’t one of those ways, or at least not an effective one. If my research on science bloggers and blog readers has told me anything, it's that if you read this blog you probably read other blogs, and you are probably a sophisticated user of online science information also interested in science communication.
In some cases, echo chambers are very obvious. If I use Twitter to tweet out all the reasons why I think more scientists should be tweeting about their science, I’m most likely preaching to the choir. My efforts would go further if I gave an in-person workshop at my university and talked to scientists who aren’t on Twitter (which I have done, recruiting new tweeting scientists in the process!) about why they should join Twitter.
How I define my communication goals, and my target audience, directly affects whether I see my blog as an echo chamber or not. And “preaching to the choir” is not always an undesirable thing.
One of the comments made during the #Scicommcamp session on echo chambers stood out to me. Cara Santa Maria (@CaraSantaMaria) made a comment to the effect that as a science communicator, you should “focus on what makes you unique” and work to truly connect and engage with readers, listeners, etc. But this brings up a clash of concepts, between engagement and reaching outside of echo chambers. Political scientists have long known that it is in fact the strong ideologues who tend to be the most engaged, to speak up in public debates and to turn out to vote. This transfers into the world of science communication.
I recently launched a Experiment.com project to raise funds for my research on science blogging. In order to reach goal, there was one very important thing I needed to do: get people to believe in and back my research in the form of hard-earned cash. Experiment.com organizers tell you from the outset that you need around 100 views on your campaign for each donation, a statistic I found to be quite accurate. But where each of those views comes from makes a big difference. I have hundreds of people who read my blog and thousands of Twitter followers. There are theoretically thousands upon thousands of people whom I could have recruited, from any venue online or offline, to view my page and read about my research project.
But as you can probably guess, the 94 backers who ended up pledging to my project and helping me reach goal weren’t random science enthusiasts who happened to reach my Experiment.com page through click-bait (right – as if I could right a click-baity headline!) All of the people who backed my project are passionate about science communication AND research ON science communication. They are my "choir." They believed in the importance of what I’m doing with my research before they ever learned of my research. My campaign simply galvanized them to show that pre-existing support. And okay, some helped out because they love me as my friends and family.
There is a point here. The point is that in some cases, getting meaningful engagement, dialogue, votes, policy support, etc. is NOT about reaching outside of echo chambers. It is in fact echo chambers that allow people with similar interests and passions to find each other and stay in touch.
We have to be careful, when talking about echo chambers in science communication and how to break out of them, that we understanding our goals and our desired audience. To what end do we want to reach people with our science communication? More eyeballs don’t necessarily equal impact if your impact is specifically defined as a type of engagement that, let’s face it, you are probably only going to get from people with similar interests.
Many science communicators who lament web-based or social network based echo chambers want something different. Let’s say your goal is to inspire a love for science among people who haven’t pursued science as a career, and perhaps people even who balk at reading science. That isn’t so difficult – you must then make science more appealing for those who don’t normally read it. (Although if they do end up reading it at all, they probably had an interest in it somewhere along the way).
This is where the creative aspects of science communication come into play. Avoid jargon. Don’t write a textbook – the people you are trying to reach probably ran away from science textbooks in school. Tell stories. Write headlines so good they get clicks, and lead paragraphs so entrancing they turn clicks into at least half-reads. Appeal to your target audience’s interests, values and curiosity. Speak in their language. Focus on the impacts of science, not the boring details. Don’t underestimate people’s intelligence or overestimate their familiarity with technical terms. Hook people with beautiful images and gut-grabbing visual representations of the data. Don’t just rely on self-selection – go seek out and recruit your desired audience. Merge science with sci-fi, art, film and popular culture. Be aware of the audience limitations of the venues you use to promote your content – Facebook’s news feed algorithms, Twitter’s more narrow audience, Reddit’s gender bias.
Those elements of storytelling and, well, just good ol’ entertaining science communication were the primary focus of most of the #Scicommcamp echo chamber discussion comments.
Anechoic chamber - This room has long wedges of foam all over the walls so there are no echoes. Image credit: Gillie Rhodes, Flickr.com
Of course, knowing when and if you’ve reached outside of your defined echo chamber is another thing entirely. This requires no short of rigorous research, based on your definition of an echo chamber. Are you preaching to the choir? Are you writing about concepts that most of your readers already know and/or agree with? You don’t know until you ask them. You could track where your readers are coming from online, who they are in terms of basic demographic variables, even their general education level. But this doesn’t usually tell you what you really need to know. Did they know this or think this way already? Is my story making any impact among other than like-minded science peeps?
Any good marketing or social awareness campaign will start with research: what does our target audience already know? Whether you search for the answer via focus groups or a survey of your readers, your challenge is the same. If you want to raise awareness of a scientific issue, find out what people already know about that issue. Figure out how and where to reach people who aren’t already aware. If you want to change behavior in the context of a scientific issue, you’ll need to study the related behaviors of your target audience. There are plenty of social scientists, audience research marketing firms, and any number of science communication consultants out there that can help science communicators with these things.
But there are more difficult scenarios, in which breaking out of echo chambers may be particularly difficult. Let’s say you are trying to reach people on the “other side” or people who are undecided on a publicly controversial scientific issue such as climate change or vaccines. This is NOT an easy task. Science communication on these topics, when the goal is to reach a wide audience, requires an understanding of the psychology of information processing. For example, science communicators should know that “facts” are largely ineffective when people are motivated to interpret data in ways that reinforce their prior beliefs or worldviews. Emotions and self-identities are tricky in these situations, and scicomm messages or language with “contentious cultural meanings” (culturalcognition.net) is often doomed from the get-go. Science communicators need to frame their communications on these issues in terms of the values of the target audience, or at least not remind people that their identities, political affiliations, cultural moorings or emotions silently tell them NOT to believe the science.
“The probability of message acceptance can be augmented by video and the targeting of content; […] indirect persuasion through interpersonal communication can increase the probability of both reception and acceptance.” – From echo chamber to persuasive device? Rethinking the role of the Internet in campaigns
Let’s imagine a discussion now, in which you tell me that you’re afraid you might just be talking about science in an echo chamber, and you ask me what you should do about it. First of all, I’d say if you figure that one out, you’ll be the richest science communicator on the planet! But more seriously, I’d encourage you to think about your goals and your target audience. Many online science communicators simply want to grow an audience that they feel is meaningful and worth they time they are putting in, with some good two-way engagement with their readers and peers as bonus. But “to what end?” Figure this out, and work out from there, so to speak.
Thoughts? Leave them below or Tweet me @fromthelabbench.