5.5
Why Don't They Hear Us? The Linguistic/Communication World of Weather Forecasting

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Tuesday, 4 February 2014: 4:30 PM
Room C108 (The Georgia World Congress Center )
Susan A. Jasko, California Univ. of Pennsylvania, California, PA

This presentation will briefly discuss the use of language in weather forecasting products (especially those produced by NWS) and illustrate how the language is used to reinforce a specifically “weather insider” sense of community rather than serve to create non-expert user understanding – despite all good intentions and much sincere effort. Socio-linguistics offers one perspective that is useful for enlarging our understanding how language functions to bot connect people and simultaneously to erect barriers to mark differences. These differences mark language users as either “insiders” or “outsiders”. Hence, language can serve or reinforce group participation and membership, but in doing so, must also reinforce outsider and non-member status. Such moments of differentiation create subsystems, rather than serving as access portals as may well be intended.

Offering another perspective, Nicklas Luhmann proposes that language is not actually sufficient to carry such differentiation and names the mechanisms that develop to carry this out level “communication codes”. But these codes are NOT linguistic. He cites examples such as “trust” and “power” (not to be confused with the psychological understanding of terms. Instead, we might say that a code, perhaps called “ technical expertise” is created by atmospheric science practice. This code keeps weather knowledge and understanding bounded and restricted to only group members and those willing and able to attain even a peripheral membership in the Wx “club”.

This code, as do all communication codes as described by Luhmann, helps to simplify certain complexities and restrict choices of those persons who engage the code. And those differences reinforce a pattern of interaction that severely limits the likelihood of the range of outcomes of that interaction. So, as long as that code is engaged, certain outcomes are virtually fixed.

The adoption of digital media and its attendant forms (from web pages to Facebook and Twitter) by NWS and private weather information vendors is an effort to circumnavigate (perhaps unknowingly) the code (technical expert) by creating digital versions of content. These efforts have varied in their success – partly depending on how one measures success and partly by whether the terms of success are measured by user understanding and influence upon user action relative to weather hazards.

Understanding the nature of this code may help forecaster sand broadcasters to develop strategies for overcoming this barrier and to build mechanisms for enhancing non-expert understanding and willingness to utilize weather related information in everyday and extraordinary circumstances.