Understanding and Breaking down of the “Black Box” effect in scientific communication

Although science is happening everyday and everywhere, science can still feel like an black box to the public, in part because most of us gain our information from the social media and tradition media. We are only exposed to the inputs and outputs selected by the media and journalists with the progress eliminated in order to allow more readers to feel strong about their articles. Also, science and technologies have evolved so much that it’s changing in an unprecedented speed. The fact that media and journalists are not able to provide every scientific information in time may also cause ambiguity and dissatisfaction among the public.

In my opinion, science is not and should not be a chain of breathtaking discoveries communicated through press releases, tweets, and hurried mass emails. Rather, it is nuanced, developmental, and often contradictory. Its own limitation has confined science itself as its advancement has empowered science. Thus, for science communication to work, anthropology of science and technology has to embrace this complexity, bringing the scientific method, and its baggage, to the foreground into the inspection of the public.

Neuroscientists have long been criticized by the public, especially animal rights organizations, of conducting researches on live animals. In particular, to someone lacking knowledge and insight into neuroscience, reports and journals posted by the media can be much more conflicting and intriguing.

In the past few decades, neuroscientists has been using electrodes, implemented in the objects’ brains, to observe how neurons behave to different stimuli and how a particular part of our brain respond to a specific event. The experiments so far have helped us a lot in gaining an insight into our bodies and into how our nervous behave in everyday life.

To experts and scholars, such experiments are totally reasonable and significant in making discoveries. It is much safer and has much control over experiments conducted directly on human beings. And using electrodes can produce more detailed information towards the object. The public, however, does not have the knowledge in such context making them much more vulnerable to partial information presented by the medias.

Anthropology of science and technology in the new age of us discovering hidden mystery of our own body has to acknowledge the problem we are facing and make every attempt to breakdown the “black box” in communication between scientists and the public to build to right public environment for further discoveries.