GNGTS 2013 - Atti del 32° Convegno Nazionale

of citizens. Overall researchers’ attitudes toward the media and the role of Giuliani are more negative among INGV than GNGTS, as testified by significant differences in the scores on the synthetic indexes. Scientists also believe that the ruling for the events in L’Aquila has negatively affected the availability of scientists to provide scientific opinions in institutional forums (82.4% GNGTS and 93.4% INGV*) and to communicate with the citizenship (about 70%). 45.4% GNGTS and 63.5% INGV* researchers believe that public’s confidence in their research field decreased following the case of L’Aquila. Conclusions. There are several significant and relevant differences between the two groups of scientists in various issues that our questionnaire touched upon. Generally speaking, INGV researchers seem to be more critical about the sentence, the media, and the role of Giuliani than their GNGTS colleagues. They also show greater sensitivity to communication issues, perhaps as consequence of their dramatic direct experience during the earthquake and the following months. Both the INGV and the GNGTS groups recognize the earthquake coverage was affected by typical signs of the so called ‘media logic’ (trivialization and dramatization of information, deep emphasis, etc.). More, by claiming not to have had enough space to explain their point of view, they implicitly testify how still problematically they can cope with the media rules. In fact, driven by a relentless research for emphasis and spectacularization in covering technoscientific issues (particularly those concerning controversies and conflicts) and with a strong propensity to alarmism, the media implicitly give the green light to pseudoscientists, social actors (e.g. Giuliani) whose profile is unfit to be represented as «experts» or «scientists» under many points of view, as briefly mentioned above. Yet, they claim to be admitted as fully qualified specialists in the public debate on Science and Technology, resulting not infrequently more appealing and understandable than the institutionalized scientists. The most evident media strategy that allows pseudoscience to enter the public arena in the case of the earthquake in L’Aquila – as somehow noticed by our interviews – consists in a sort of «par condicio» or «equalization of positions» approach. It refers to the media tendency, very strong in the Italian press and television, to provide public with bipolar representations of controversial issues. To those of the public less equipped to critically interpret media messages, science would therefore appear as perfectly divided into two parties, even in cases – e.g. the climate change, creationism vs. evolutionism, etc. – where the internal equilibriums of the scientific community are distributed in a very different way. The case of L’Aquila is a further radicalization of this strategy: not able to replicate any division within the community of seismologists (since scientists agree almost unanimously about the impossibility to predict seismic events), the Italian media have brought into the public debate a former technician of the Institute of Physics of Interplanetary Space detached to the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso, Giampaolo Giuliani, who claimed to have predicted the disaster of April 6, 2009 with a radon detector, without having any scientific trustworthiness in the field of seismology. As new updates are needed to complete the in-depth exploration of what happened among the five components we briefly put in our model (fig. 1), what has been discussed so far seems to show that – while there is still much work to do to bridge science and society – such a desirable process can not be accomplished without the scientific community itself acquire communication skills and tools to effectively be on the media arena, also competing with social actors (i.e. pseudoscientists and other opinion leaders) that in an ‘ideal’ (as now utopian) context would not be considered competitors. Acknowledgements. The authors want to thank Dr. Cesare Comina (University of Turin), Dr. Sergio Vinciguerra (University of Leicester), Dr. Lucia Montanari and Dr. Alessandro Amato (INGV), for their fundamental help in revising and dealing out the survey. 138 GNGTS 2013 S essione 1.1