Comments on: Message- vs. community-centered models in risk communication

By: Yuta+Koshiba

Yuta+Koshiba — Sun, 11 Oct 2020 14:25:09 +0000

From this article, I agree that risk communication involves “communicative competence” as the more essential part than only linguistic competence. The linguistic aspect is one of the perspectives of risk communication, not all. When people convey to other people accurately what they are saying, it usually needs beyond the language aspects, including multimodal aspects, gesture, context, and culture. This is because there is a possibility of misunderstanding if it is only the linguistic aspect. On the linguistic side alone, the spread of false information on SNS, such as Tweeter, is one of the examples of misunderstanding. For example, in Japan, there was information about the recommendation of not wearing a mask to not be harmful to people’s health. The general people need to wonder which community the information is and whether it is believable information. Therefore, with the development of social media, people need to improve digital literacy skills to obtain true information.

By: Ingrid Piller

Ingrid Piller — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 03:23:30 +0000

In reply to Tazin Abdullah. Thanks, Tazin! Good reminder that being able to comply with a public health directive may be a privilege in some contexts. Communication certainly looks like a second-order problem here ...

By: Tazin Abdullah

Tazin Abdullah — Wed, 07 Oct 2020 00:10:30 +0000

I find the statement, “If people understand a message, will that automatically mean that they accept it?” so telling of what has happened in many communities across the world during the COVID19 pandemic. As lockdowns were introduced around the world, information regarding the virus was being disseminated across Bangladesh. From what I read, schools, offices and factories were being shutdown. In Dhaka, the capital city, the substantial numbers whose livelihood is from manual labour were being told very clearly to stay home and police were enforcing the rules on the streets.
At that time, a friend from Dhaka said to me that the poor people of Dhaka understood clearly the message to stay at home but they also said that they would die of hunger before they died of the virus. For this community of people, the message could state unequivocally the dangers of the virus spreading or what could happen to them but it would be unlikely to strike the intended fear and action. In their reality, a lot worse exits and a lot worse may have already happened, so COVID19 would not be the big deal that government information makes it out to be.
I think situations like this, it is very important to find ways of communicating that are community-centred and meaningful to the context of those being spoken to.