My Take on Chapters 4 & 6

My initial reaction to this week’s readings is one of surprising satisfaction. I say that because, as usual, I was truly not expecting to actually enjoy the chapters. Instead, I was prepared to plow though the assigned material. I think that I enjoyed reading the chapters because the authors’ style is somewhat simple coupled with the fact that I find the topic to be interesting. Okay, enough praising of the book. When describing organizational constraints, the authors listed inadequate resources as being one of the potential roadblocks. They included the following statement within that section:
Many organizations that would never refuse a scientist software to calculate dose quite easily turn down a requisition for desktop publishing equipment that would make it easier and less expensive to create and revise risk messages which are far more readable for the intended audience (p.48)
At the risk of showing how little knowledge I have about available software in general, I wonder, what sort of software would actually help a practitioner to create and revise risk messages? Are they talking about something as simple as Microsoft Word being unavailable? Isn’t the skill in the mind of the professional communicator what can create messages rather than any piece of software?
In the section discussing hostility and outrage as constraints from the audience, the example of people resisting change by saying that generations before them had drank from the same water featured the following suggestion: “A possible way to overcome this type of attitude is to show not only the dangers of continuing risky behavior but the benefits of changing behavior to something less risky” (p. 62). I thought that another important and perhaps successful message would be to show when/how the change took place (perhaps with visuals) because such illustration might explain why the situation has changed.
The section addressing panic and denial included the statement that “[p]anic and denial are beyond the skills of most risk communicators to manage.” Yet, this led me to think that those people in panic or denial can still influence others. So, messages that clearly illustrate the situation and particularly disprove claims from those in denial are essential to a crisis communicator’s efforts.
In the section addressing constraints for both the communicator and the audience, the segment on stability of the knowledge base gave examples of scenarios in which “experts on a particular risk often disagree on the magnitude or effects of the risk” (p.68). So, if the experts that you bring forth are challenged by their colleagues or if the study that you quote is considered to be too general or too specific, what do you do? I’d really like to know the answer to that question. In the past year, I’ve seen this scenario play out quite often with the global warming issue. Whereas I am an environmentalist and believe in all of the current movement’s efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions, I’ve had some pretty heated discussions with others who argue that reputable scientists have discredited the global warming threat.
In chapter 6, several of the suggestions were sensible, so there was really not much to comment on except for what seemed like the authors’ comments. For instance, after reading three pages into the chapter, I realized that many U.S government agencies were listed as examples of what not to do. The section on explaining reductions in magnitude included the following statement:
While research in this area is quite complicated, one suggestion is to illustrate this concept graphically. The presidential/Congressional Commission on Risk Assessment and Risk Management (1997) recommends bar charts to show the radical differences between scales (p. 109).
The above-mentioned statement, although not unclear had the following interpretation from me: “We don’t really know what to do or what to tell you to do. But hey, here’s what these people who often do things wrong tell you to do.”