Message in a bottle

     Now that I've gotten your hopes up about the prospect of me writing something fascinating and sending it out to sea with nothing but a thin layer of glass to protect it from the world, I have to let you down. I haven't put a message into a bottle, and I certainly haven't thrown a bottle into the sea (thanks for nothing, landlocked Ohio!). In fact, I haven't even written a message (though I did type one).

     For the final meeting of this seminar focused on effective communication of science to the public, we are using the concept of the message box to distill our work into a format that is easy to communicate. We are encouraged to think inside the box, where our thoughts are rigidly confined, sorted, and limited by space. While all of this sounds fairly negative, it seems that these restrictions are essential for scientists to effectively communicate with the public. The message box forces scientists to sort whatever it is they are trying to say into a few key areas. The issue is similar to the title of a scientific paper or newspaper article, and serves as the floor of the box. Perhaps the most important of the four walls is the so what? section, where scientists have to justify why anyone should even care about their work. Two opposing walls problems and solutions, help set the stage for the results and provide an outlook for the future, respectively. The last wall, benefits relates to the so what? wall by showing how the solutions can relate to the public.

     I struggled to complete my own message box for a few reasons. 1) I don't really have a complete research program in place yet. I've completed a few projects that are distantly related, and only two of them are even connected to my proposed dissertation work. This puts me in an awkward position, as I'm not sure I have a message yet, let alone one that can fit nicely into a box. 2) My research is not very applicable to people in general. Yes, I could use the findings from my work to generalize to all ecosystems, but that amounts to hand waving and straw grasping, neither of which make me terrible comfortable. While the organisms I study do occur in agricultural fields, my research focus is not applied to crop production or pest suppression. 3) Perhaps most importantly, I felt that the message box template was designed for researchers who work with real problems: global warming, epidemics, habitat loss, fishery collapse, cancer, the end of the world, and so on. It would have been nice to see an example from someone who works on something more mundane, or at least less directly applied to human welfare.

     I started to wonder if these examples were chosen simply because these are the ones that scientists want to communicate to the public. There certainly would be a bias toward reporting these kinds of messages to the public, but I don't think that means scientists studying in other fields should give up. Sure, someone who discovers that a species of amphipod communicates by releasing pheromones from its eyes might get a high-profile publication in a scientific journal, but will the public care? I like to think that people are fundamentally curious about the world and what scientists do to learn about it, but I don't think all research fields are equally interesting for a general audience. Hopefully this hasn't come off too negatively; I just don't see myself being interviewed for an article in the New York Times about my current research.

I'll just have to wait until I start a post-doc in microscopic extraterrestrial spider volcanoes, or something...