Broom Bridge, Dublin. Image: Joaquin Ossorio Castillo/Shutterstock
Elaine Burke learns from a weekend surrounded by expert science communicators how storytelling can bridge our historic past and scientific future.
Science and storytelling are strange bedfellows. It’s hard, dispassionate fact versus fluid, evocative truth-stretching.
But as long as people have shared stories, they have done so to spread word of a community’s values and its expectations. A fable-inspired hero can stand up for what is deemed right and just, and be warned of the lurking dangers (though they may not be dragons).
There is certainly a place for scientific reason amid the values of a 21st-century society that values education, progress and technological advancement, but communicating those values takes more than research papers circulated among the elite group qualified enough to read them.
This month, Dublin hosted its fifth annual Festival of Curiosity and the first conference event in the series: Future/Story. The target audience was science communicators and factual storytellers, and the line-up included academics, TV producers, National Geographicexplorers, puppeteers, virtual-reality experimenters and an Oscar-winning animator.
One of the day’s first speakers, Dr M Jackson, made the case that “human stories that are not packageable, that are not neat” are nonetheless important to share, even when it comes to communicating complex scientific issues.
A glaciologist, Jackson’s work is entwined with a contentious science-based topic the public is becoming more and more engaged with: climate change. But Jackson doesn’t see scientific reports inspiring the public to act on climate change. “I don’t see truth bridging to action,” she said. “Metrics don’t move us any more.”
Something that undeniably did spur the public consciousness to consider humanity’s environmental impact was a TV show that was cited multiple times by the storytellers at this event. Blue Planet, according to wildlife documentary producer John Murray, changed the game in his industry. Up to two years ago, he said, there was little to no interest in conservation stories from commissioning editors. Then came a series spending upwards of £1m per hour to produce, reaching 14m viewers in the UK alone and, in the final moments of its glorious seven-episode celebration of the beauty of marine life, they took on what Future/Story MC Dr Claire O’Connell dubbed “the plastic elephant in the room”.
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Source: Silicon Republic