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What “Epistemic Communication” Means to Me

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Photo: Anna Keibalo via Pexels · Pexels License A headline can do a remarkable amount of work in very few words. It can tell us what happened, identify someone responsible, signal urgency and suggest how we ought to feel about the story. It can also make an interpretation sound like an established fact. One useful moment for me occurs when I notice that a headline has led me towards a conclusion before I have read the article. That is not evidence of deliberate manipulation. Headlines have limited space, and editors have real decisions to make. But it is a reason to notice where the words end and my own inference begins. When I use the phrase “epistemic communication”, I mean something quite practical: paying attention to how claims acquire the appearance of knowledge as they move between people. The headline tells me what to look at. I still need to decide what the evidence allows me to conclude. A report is not t...
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From Headlines to Human Attention

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Photo: Max Bonda via Pexels · Pexels License I studied journalism long before I became interested in psychology, adult education and the questions about communication that occupy so much of my attention today. At the time, I probably thought of journalism as preparation for a particular profession. Looking back, I am beginning to appreciate something else: it also taught me a way of approaching information. What deserves attention? What needs explaining? What can be left out without losing something important? And how do we turn a great deal of material into something another person can actually follow? Those questions have followed me much further than I might once have expected. Journalism taught me that communicating more information is not necessarily the same as communicating better. The discipline of choosing One of journalism's most useful lessons is that information has to be organised. A report ca...
Location: Australia
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When News Becomes Part of How We Feel Connected

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Photo: Jakub Zerdzicki via Pexels · Pexels License T he news is almost always on around me. That does not mean I am always sitting in front of the screen, watching every story from beginning to end. Often it is simply there: a familiar voice in the room, a headline I catch while doing something else, a change in tone that makes me look up. I had never thought much about the distinction between watching the news and having the news on . Lately, that distinction has become interesting to me. It is a small habit, but precisely the kind of ordinary media behaviour I'd like to talk about today. Some media habits are decisions. Others can quietly become part of the architecture of daily life. A blind habit Some media habits are decisions. Others become part of the architecture of one's day. That sounds trivial, but research on news use makes habit difficult to dismiss. The Australian Communications and Media Au...
Location: Australia
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Communication Looks Different When Psychology Enters the Picture

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Photo: Macourt Media via Pexels · Pexels License C ommunication often begins with something we can control: the words we choose, the explanation we give, the image we publish. What happens afterwards is much less tidy. Psychology has made me increasingly curious about that second part. Once a message reaches another person, it encounters attention, emotion, trust, memory and judgement. I have started to realise that some of the most useful questions about communication begin precisely where control over the message ends. Communication often begins with something we can control, but what happens afterwards is much less tidy. From message to encounter Attention is now one of the first places I prefer to look. A message can be clear and accurate yet barely register if something else is competing for attention. Research on selective attention is a useful reminder that processing is selective rather than an exhaustive re...
Location: Australia
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One Question, From Different Angles

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Photo: KoolShooters via Pexels · Pexels License O ne of the stranger things about studying across several fields is that their boundaries look much clearer on course websites than they do in real life. Psychology has one subject code, communication another, teaching another. Yet the same problem keeps turning up: information can be available without being understood, understood without being usable, and usable in one setting without travelling easily into the next. What looked to me, throughout the years, like separate interests in psychology, communication, teaching, language learning, research and support work, are now increasingly feeling like a recurring question about the space between knowing something and being able to do something with it . I keep arriving at the same gap: between information being available and a person being able to use it. Same question, different places Communication makes this gap easy to ...
Location: Australia
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The Problem Before the Problem

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Photo: Kurt:S via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0 P roblems rarely begin where we first notice them. A misunderstanding may begin with what people do or do not share as common ground; a decision, with how the options are framed; a breakdown in trust, with what earlier interactions taught someone to expect. I don't believe every problem has one neat root cause, and I'm oftentimes interested in knowing what happened before the visible endpoint: what was communicated, what was assumed, what choices seemed available, and which relationship or earlier decision changed what came next. The point where a problem becomes visible is not necessarily the point where it began. What happened before that? A misunderstanding is a simple example. Correcting the final piece of information may be enough to move on. But experiments on common ground found that shared knowledge and assumptions affect how questions are formed and unde...
Location: Australia
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They Were Already Doing It

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[Image: ALFINete ] I have been thinking about media literacy for years: reading the research, writing about it, building it into the way I think about communication and psychology. And yet the finding that stopped me most recently came from a group of Year 10 students in Australia whose first language is not English, who arrived here from somewhere else, and who were quietly doing something most adults I know don't do: asking "what do they want me to believe?" before sharing a political post. That detail is from Jennifer Alford's 2023 study , which I've written about at length over at EMPOWERVERSE. Go there for the full analysis: the research design, the five strategies, the supporting evidence, and what it means for adult education. What I want to do here is something different: sit with what it felt like to read it. The students who taught me the most were the ones navigating a world they hadn't grown up in, in a language they were still le...
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