In the Era of Pan-Entertainment, Why Should Popular Science Communication Remain Faithful To Facts?

 Ecological protection is inseparable from ecological communication and popular science propaganda. The Internet age has brought great convenience to information dissemination on the one hand, but it is also inevitably affected by pan-entertainment on the other. Based on the long-term cooperation with Bohai College of Journalism and Communication, Mr. Yu Lian, director of the Jinzhou Great Bustard Conservation Area of CBCGDF, has felt the trend of popular science dissemination towards pan-entertainment. After thinking about it, he believes that news and popular science dissemination should strictly control the quality of creation from the three dimensions of originality, authenticity and values to create greater dissemination value.

 


The following is Yu Lian’s experience sharing:

 

I have been working with the Jinniaozhou team of the School of Journalism and Communication of Bohai University for many years. This is a team carefully organized by the School of Journalism and Communication of Bohai University. They are committed to promoting the bird ecology of Jinzhou, showing the style of Jinzhou wildlife protection volunteers, and carrying out a lot of popular science work. The team is mainly composed of college students, and professional instructors are involved. They have created many excellent works in the past, but the latest creation encountered difficulties.

 

I serve as an instructor in the team and go to the campus every year to teach members. Every time I go there, I can feel their full enthusiasm. Almost every time, there are members asking me how to become a volunteer and the scope of volunteer work. I am mainly responsible for reviewing the children's works to ensure that the professional knowledge is accurate. After all, I have been engaged in wildlife protection volunteer work for 10 years and have some experience in the professional field.

 

During the recent review process, I found that there were some deviations in the creative direction of the recent team's works. Although it is not a major problem, I think there may be something wrong with the creative direction. The latest works are mainly about popular science, but they show some undesirable phenomena, mainly that popular science has become entertainment-oriented. This may be difficult to avoid in the creation of young people. After all, they are mostly exposed to similar articles and works in the online environment. Especially after the booming development of new media, the entry threshold of online media has been greatly lowered, causing almost all kinds of topics to tend to be entertainment-oriented, and the phenomenon of clickbait is rampant. In the field of entertainment-oriented topics, this may be acceptable, but when applied to popular science creation, it seems not rigorous enough, and may mislead readers and viewers, or even spread wrong information, causing negative effects.

 

In my opinion, popular science is a very serious matter. Its core is to spread correct and valuable knowledge and to pass on knowledge that can have a positive impact on the construction of ecological civilization. The scope of popular science is quite broad. It not only spreads specific knowledge of biology, but also covers correct ecological concepts, ideas and thinking methods. This can't help but make me think that maybe I should explain to the team members the communication value of my work as I understand it. With my 10 years of experience as a wildlife conservation volunteer, I told the children which content has communication value and which is relatively weak.

 

This year marks my 11th year as a wildlife conservation volunteer. One of my work focuses is to publicize the status of birds in Jinzhou through patrol results.

 

The rise of new media has certainly created great convenience for information dissemination, but it has also caused the threshold for information dissemination to drop sharply, and the information disseminated on the Internet is mixed, and it is difficult to distinguish true from false. Although it seems that the entire media entertainment wave is surging and unstoppable, our popular science position must not follow the trend, because the entertainment of news and popular science will have a serious negative impact on society. Therefore, I hope that our team will strictly control the quality of creation from the three dimensions of originality, authenticity and values in the creative process, so as to create greater communication value.

 

Original Chinese Article: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/EZmJQxyy7-hrJppR8mecVw

Translator: Maggie

Editor: Maggie

Checked by: Richard     

Contact: v10@cbcgdf.org; +8617319454776

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