modernag

A Girl Least Likely, Part IV

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

DO YOU SOCIAL MEDIA? (cont’d from Part III) Don’t get me wrong. I loved what I was doing as an academic researcher, but I found myself feeling a bit disconnected from the real world. I felt isolated in that ivory tower and I didn’t always ‘fit in’. I was hungry to connect with public, with farmers in particular. I wanted a stronger connection with the people that grew our food and, of course, the consumers that ate it.

My students in a third year Research Methodology class that I was teaching at the University of Calgary dragged me kicking a screaming onto Facebook in 2007. There, and on Twitter, I found a voice. I was able to share what I knew and learned and engage in dialogue about agriculture from my unique perspective.

I was an early entrant to the social media space on this topic. At the time, I predicted that social media would radically change the conversation around food and agriculture.  And not necessarily for the better. While my colleagues in academia saw social media as a passing fad, we soon discovered that things played more or less how I expected. And throughout all this, I continued to engage online — and I even got into it with some basement-dwelling trolls.

This all landed me a bit of notoriety. I scored invites to Canola Camp in Manitoba. I got to be a farmer for a day with the Galbraith family. I participated in media interviews. I was invited to write mainstream articles for the Western Producer, Scientific American, and Genetic Literacy Project.

I co-led the organization of the very first Biotech Bootcamp at the University of Florida. There have since been 4 more in North America. I even had the opportunity to present on a panel with renowned journalist, Mark Lynas.

And this all lead me to my current role with Bayer where I get to be part of an organization doing so much to advance modern agriculture and improve lives.

This was my unexpected journey through agriculture. There was some planning, a few accidents along the way (happy and unhappy ones), a bit of serendipity, and a lot of good luck.  I was blessed with some amazing mentors and I learned from mentoring moments – both good and bad. 

Amid the grief, loss, chaos, and some very marvelous milestones, I learned a few things:

  1. We are told these days to tell our stories in agriculture. But life’s personal triumphs and tragedies cannot be disentangled from our vocation in ag. I encourage you to let your skeletons dance. Embrace your vulnerabilities and share them. Because without darkness there can be no light.
  2. Lean into discomfort: for example, engaging in new conversations with new people who may think a bit differently than you do. There are great rewards in it and, I promise you, some very pleasant surprises.
  3. Self-doubt. It’s a universal, and a very human response to some of the crap that life deals you. But don’t let self-doubt define you – allow it drive you. When that renowned plant scientist tells you that you won’t amount to anything, prove him spectacularly wrong. Don’t get one degree, get two.
  4. This sounds cliché but don’t take any moment in your life for granted. Personal stories have a way of gaining new meaning over time.  In the mid-90s, my feet were firmly planted in the middle of a story that I had no idea I was part of. That team of scientists that I served coffee to in Saskatoon was the same team that brought genetically engineered canola to the market.  That was huge event in Canada’s agriculture history. And while I didn’t get the significance of the story I was living out then, I certainly get it now.

Speaking of things coming full circle, remember that farm boy I married back in the 80s? Well, guess what, after almost two decades after our divorce, we rediscovered one another and have since remarried.

Final words of wisdom:

“For every one person that tells you you can’t do something, surround yourself with five more than tell you you can.

Enlist their help to get you there.

Then succeed spectacularly.“

A Girl Least Likely, Part I, Part II, Part III

Disinformation: the bad stuff is always easier to believe

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

Disinformation. It’s easy to believe and hard to ignore. More and more we are beginning to understand how much mis/disinformation leads to socioeconomic costs and how it impacts scientific integrity. Here are a few sources/links that (I hope) helps us continue the dialogue:

1) A link to the study we published in February 2020. It is entitled The Monetization of Disinformation: the case of GMOs and was published in a special issue of the European Management Journal on The Dark Side of Social Media. The journal article but provides evidence and understanding of how misinformation impacts science and societies. We use GMOs as a case study, but this could (generally) apply to any number of issues (from farm to fork and beyond (public health issues)).

  • Summary:
    • We analyzed a dataset of 94,993 unique online articles (2009-2019) for the evaluation of various tactics that contribute to the evolving GMO narrative. Preliminary results suggest that a small group of alternative health and pro-conspiracy sites received more totals engagements on social media than sites commonly regarded as media outlets on the topic of GMOs. Other externalities observed include continued social and political controversy that surround the GMO topic, events (demonstrations, legislative initiatives, ballots, etc) as well as the growth of additional product and marketing approaches such as “non-GMO” verification.

Fig. 2

  • Figure: Total shares of GMO online articles over time (2009-2019) 

Fig. 3

  • Figure: Key Events and Online Engagement (2009-2019) 
    • Social media has revolutionized how we connect as human beings and is a vehicle for sharing false or deceptive information (disinformation).
    • Disinformation is firmly planted in the ‘attention economy’, a competitive economy where human attention is a scarce resource.
    • Disinformation is used by vendors to attract readership with strategies to monetize it.
    • Disinformation influences public opinion and risk perceptions and this, in turn, results in policies developed based on disinformation rather than scientific evidence.
    • Disinformation has been used to problematize science, impeding innovation and affecting social license to operate across a number of sectors (science, farming and food production, etc).
  • Importance of the study
    • Distortion of science inappropriately raises the risk profile of good technologies which results in delays in getting socially vital products to the market (e.g., virus resistant cassava), or shelved or unrealized innovations (e.g., New Leaf potato, Calgene tomato), and even the loss of important research through vandalization of field trials.

2) This blog post from LinkedIn The bad stuff is always easier to believe: disinformation, modern ag, and societies provides useful background and links.

Profiting-from-Disinformation-The-Case-of-Genetically-Modified-Organisms-Bayer-Crop-Science

3) Don’t want to read the whole study? I get it and I don’t blame you! If you are a podcast lover and love the audio experience like I do, here is a SciPod summary of the paper which provides a 9 minute easy-listening overview of the paper. Profiting from Disinformation: The Case of Genetically Modified Organisms.

4) Additionally, check out this letter I wrote for Purdue University’s Center for Food and Agricultural Business on disinformation and advocacy: Dis/misinformation: difficult to detect and hard to ignore.

5) Here are some @CamiDRyan Twitter threads on the topic:

6) Communicating Ag in an Attention Economy, Talking Biotech Podcast with Kevin Folta.

If you have any questions or comments, please reach out!

Other resources:

Carley, K. et al. (2020). Many Twitter Accounts Spreading COVID Falsehoods.

Caulfield, T. (2020). Twitter thread on Misinformation (includes infographics).

Evanega, S., Lynas, M., Adams, J., Smolenyak, K., & Insights, C. G. (2020). Coronavirus misinformation: quantifying sources and themes in the COVID-19 ‘infodemic’.

Institute for Strategy Dialogue (ISD) (2020). Anatomy of a Disinformation Empire: Investigating Natural News. Report.

Johnson, N. F., Velásquez, N., Restrepo, N. J., Leahy, R., Gabriel, N., El Oud, S., … & Lupu, Y. (2020). The online competition between pro-and anti-vaccination views. Nature, 1-4.

Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Ecker, U. K. H., Albarracín, D., Amazeen, M. A., Kendeou, P., Lombardi, D., Newman, E. J., Pennycook, G., Porter, E. Rand, D. G., Rapp, D. N., Reifler, J., Roozenbeek, J., Schmid, P., Seifert, C. M., Sinatra, G. M., Swire-Thompson, B., van der Linden, S., Vraga, E. K., Wood, T. J., Zaragoza, M. S. (2020). The Debunking Handbook 2020.

Ryan, C. D., Schaul, A. J., Butner, R., & Swarthout, J. T. (2020). Monetizing disinformation in the attention economy: The case of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). European Management Journal, 38(1), 7-18.

Van Krieken, R. (forthcoming) Economy of Attention and Attention Capital. Forthcoming in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer & Chris Rojek

4 Steps to Good Storytelling

/ Cami Ryan, PhD / Leave a comment

shutterstock_583889863 [Converted]

Last year, I was invited to share my science communication story at CropLife Canada’s Spring Dialogue Days. It was great to be standing in front of a crowd of 150+ of my peers, friends, and colleagues in the capitol of my homeland. I was home and all was right with the world.

In the days leading up to the event, however, I struggled to find the right blend of life events and lessons-learned to share with this crowd. What would be most meaningful?

The past 20+ years has been a rich tapestry of experiences for me from a science communication perspective (starting here…up until now). I ended up sharing a personal story of milestones and anecdotes from the past 10 years. Most significantly, though, I shared some observations about the evolving role that storytelling plays in building public trust in modern agriculture.

As Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, states: “The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.” We humans love stories. Stories are woven into the social fabric of our lives. Words matched with imaginative expression bring stories to life. A good story – when it’s told well – releases chemicals in the listener’s brain. These chemical reactions build trust between the storyteller and the listener.

As an industry, we have come to recognize this power that storytelling has. Stories are channels for sharing information, learning, and for building and sustaining relationships. We find common ground by sharing the human experience. Yes, farmers and scientists are stepping out from fields and labs to share their stories. But the art and science of storytelling is evolving. And storytelling today requires a whole new level of agility and ingenuity than it ever has before. It is one part engagement and two parts personal branding. It also requires an aptitude for self-reflection. Here are some tips:

1) Know your audience. That’s a given, right? Well, not exactly. Knowing your audience today means something entirely different than it did 10 years ago. It requires social networking savvy and a nuanced understanding of human behavior (your own included). Ideologies and perceptions are reinforced by our close personal networks (and those networks have expanded since the onset of the Internet). We humans depend upon our personal networks for social survival. If stories don’t reflect our personal and network identities, we are less likely to connect with them and the storytellers because – let’s face it – our social survival depends on it. The last thing that we want is to be voted off the island.

2) Be clever; be creative. We live in a ‘fast information nation.’ People want to be entertained first, informed second. Our ‘social living room space’ has expanded and new tools and platforms pop up everyday. Take advantage of them. Use your words wisely and economically. Paint pictures with your words. Don’t be afraid to use humour. Think outside your own bubble (community, tribe, sector, discipline, vocation…).

3) Stories not only have to be compelling, they must be useful. The Oxford English dictionary defines useful as: “Able to be used for a practical purpose or in several ways.” As I see it, stories need to be:

  • Accessible: Is it readily available in spaces where your audience can find it? Think: social media platforms. Be where people are.
  • Relatable: Can a listener understand the content or the plotline? Lose the jargon! How does your story matter to the listener? Example: Does your science or farm story resonate with a suburban mom? Anticipate how she might share that story with her friends and family members. Equip her with the best metaphors.
  • Transferable: How can someone use your story to enhance their own? Your story needs to tap into and cut across cultures and belief systems in this world of mass information and diminishing attention spans.

4) Avoid the pitfalls of drive-by storytelling. This is when we shape a compelling story, drop it into a conversation, and then quickly move on. Be present. Track your story. When appropriate, update and engage around that narrative to reflect current events or new social realities.

Today, people have a very narrow view of science and its role in modern agriculture. Our job as science communicators is to expand knowledge in meaningful ways. Stories can be a vehicle for that. They are a mirror for social organization and community-based values and reflections of personal identities. We must keep in mind, however, that while communicating the value of science is very important, how we carry it out in this network-driven world matters even more. We must seek avenues to communicate the good news about science and modern agriculture in ways that won’t alienate people from their personal networks – and their identities.

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This blog post a slightly re-imagined version of guest postI wrote for SAIFood.ca in May 2017. That original post is here.