2338 shaares
Intéressant, sur la difficulté de communiquer de façon impartiale en journalisme et science. Extraits choisis. Le gars bossait dans la section communication scientifique à la BBC, et a commencé à remettre en question sa façon de bosser en bossant au Winston centre:
"Officially we were supposed to ‘inform, educate, entertain’ and we thought we knew how to do all three. Now, though, I am beginning to question what exactly science communication is doing.
(...) Evidence presented purely to inform — balanced and not trying to persuade a person to agree or disagree — does not make for entertainment, almost by definition.
(...) in order to make a good decision, researchers believe that we first need to make ourselves imagine more than one potential future scenario. We need to open our minds to the possibility that things could turn out well or badly. We need emotion.
(...) We all have a right to be ‘informed and not persuaded’ — an ethical right and often a legal right. And yet training in communication focuses almost entirely on how to grab attention and how to manipulate emotions to tell a story — how to be persuasive. There is very little training on how to use emotions more subtly, in a way that opens minds to possibilities constructively, but is not designed to persuade (I’m certainly still learning how it might be done).
Of course in a competitive environment it is important to get your voice heard, and I often hear people say their objective is to persuade people to ‘do the right thing’. But who is defining ‘right’? If you as the communicator are — if you are defining the story — then you are not simply informing.
When people are making really important decisions — decisions about their health, their finances, about policies that will affect millions, or about someone’s guilt or innocence — I would now argue that a different kind of communication is needed: the skill to engage and be clear and to allow the audience to form their own story through the information, and to make their own decision at the end as to how to react to it."
"Officially we were supposed to ‘inform, educate, entertain’ and we thought we knew how to do all three. Now, though, I am beginning to question what exactly science communication is doing.
(...) Evidence presented purely to inform — balanced and not trying to persuade a person to agree or disagree — does not make for entertainment, almost by definition.
(...) in order to make a good decision, researchers believe that we first need to make ourselves imagine more than one potential future scenario. We need to open our minds to the possibility that things could turn out well or badly. We need emotion.
(...) We all have a right to be ‘informed and not persuaded’ — an ethical right and often a legal right. And yet training in communication focuses almost entirely on how to grab attention and how to manipulate emotions to tell a story — how to be persuasive. There is very little training on how to use emotions more subtly, in a way that opens minds to possibilities constructively, but is not designed to persuade (I’m certainly still learning how it might be done).
Of course in a competitive environment it is important to get your voice heard, and I often hear people say their objective is to persuade people to ‘do the right thing’. But who is defining ‘right’? If you as the communicator are — if you are defining the story — then you are not simply informing.
When people are making really important decisions — decisions about their health, their finances, about policies that will affect millions, or about someone’s guilt or innocence — I would now argue that a different kind of communication is needed: the skill to engage and be clear and to allow the audience to form their own story through the information, and to make their own decision at the end as to how to react to it."