Hodson on information as a garden
Canada Research Chair in Digital Communication for the Public Interest Assoc. Prof. Jaigris Hodson wrote about vaccine misinformation for The Conversation Canada.
Here is an excerpt:
When people try to address vaccine misinformation efforts are often ignored. This is because vaccine hesitancy, like all misinformation, is a complex problem. To address it, we need to think about a wide variety of different contributing factors that are systemic in nature and interact with one another. We can say that this problem is ecological in nature.
We live in an information environment which is increasingly complex and subject to dynamic intersecting systems and processes. Gardening provides a helpful metaphor to help us understand how misinformation can be seen as part of this information ecology.
Using a gardening metaphor, the seed of knowledge is vaccine science. And this seed can be impacted by many different factors.