Distortion, confusion, and impasses: could a public dialogue within Knowledge Landscapes contribute to better communication and understanding of innovative knowledge?

Sustainable solutions and political regulation require public discussions, engagement, and dialogue at the interfaces between science and society. The communication and medialization of innovative knowledge is a key aspect for societal engagement, but also a major source of distortion. Knowledge about bio-objects, generated from biomedical and biotechnical research, causes uncertainty and societal controversies about ethics and risk, and new communicative strategies are required to face complex and potentially controversial topics generated by biology innovation, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), stem cell research, gene therapy, (xeno-) transplantation, biobank research, recombinant pharmaceutics, etc. The amount of innovative knowledge is constantly increasing, and because of the internet, and Open Access initiatives, it is mostly freely available. However, the abundance of information available on the web, together with the fact that almost everybody can distribute information of varying quality on social online media, often leads to an overflow of communication and the situation of communication impasses. The delegation of the public communication of innovative scientific knowledge to public relations (PR) experts adds a further source of distortion in the communication process. Although communication aims at dialogue, this is frequently not achieved due to the variety of communicators involved and their different goals.