The Norwegian Tourist Board and the Cruise Line companies alike may experience some loss of visitors, revenues and perhaps falling stocks. When, just two months later, the MSC Opera<\/a> crashed into a dock and ploughed into a tourist boat in Venice\u2019s Giudecca canal, the news agenda was once again led with images of a large cruise ship, out of control, imperilling tourists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\nSocial Amplification of Risk Framework, or SARF<\/a>, attempts to come to terms\nwith such vexing matters of public concern, where there is genuine danger but the\npublic response to the risk is said to be exacerbated by the media. Examples are\nall too frequent. A recent article in Risk Analysis<\/a> applies\nthe framework to an outbreak of Zika virus. Recently people worried about whether\nrisk surrounding the toxic chemical Fipronil<\/a> found in some\nDutch eggs was exaggerated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n ‘It was like the Titanic’: Britons’ relive terror after cruise liner is engulfed by storm as traumatised passengers donning life jackets are pictured waiting for helicopter rescue<\/p>Daily Mail<\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n As time goes by, the real<\/em> risk behind these headline grabbers can seem undeserving of all the fuss. People then accuse the media of whipping up such controversies, fuelling public concern and sometimes forcing the government into knee-jerk reactions. A picture is often painted of a hype-crazed media intent upon over-dramatising relatively unimportant risks. SARF captures this disquiet, defining broadcasters and newspapers, along with social media, as social stations of amplification<\/em>. To express this idea in more general terms, SARF characterises controversial risk events in terms of some sort of problematic, variable, mediated, societal response. Psychology Today<\/em> recently summarized this popular notion, claiming that amplified risk information creates public hysteria<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Louder or Riskier?<\/strong> The plausibility of this view is easy to understand, but here my intention is to issue a warning to approach this framework with care. From the outset, questions over what is supposedly being amplified have dogged SARF. Is the media coverage itself somehow disproportionate to the risk, or is the risk itself materially increased: is it louder or riskier? I offer to chart a course through these troubled waters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SARF is built upon on an electronic\/acoustic metaphor of amplification<\/em>, conjuring up the idea of\nincreasing loudness and playing to a common-sense understanding of the way risk\ninformation is experienced. \u2018Volume\neffects\u2019, as described by SARF pioneer Ortwin Renn<\/a>, are\nsaid to intensify (amplify) messages about risks via societal communication\nprocesses depicted as signals and receivers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The first problem is that while loudness <\/em>may be appropriate as an everyday heuristic, risk analysis needs to be more exacting; it needs to be clear about what is being amplified and how. Clarity is required because one of the defining features of risk analysis is an underlying objective to mitigate risk. In other words, risk is characterised primarily so that it can be managed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This is where a loudness<\/em> reading of SARF quickly starts to unravel, as first highlighted by the sociologist Are Rip in his article, \u2018Should Social Amplification of Risk Be Counteracted\u2019<\/a>. Rip wants to know whether SARF is making value judgements or describing objective miscalculation. In short, how do we know whether a particular risk is being amplified or not? Whilst I, or anyone else can say that a risk is attracting too much noise, this is just opinion. To demonstrate \u2018too much\u2019 from an analytical perspective we might expect a corresponding value that is not excessive. SARF offers no benchmark or any sort of scale that helps to make the loudness<\/em> concept useable. Without any objective mechanism SARF cannot help in determining how much anyone ought<\/em> to worry about anything. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gauging appropriate levels of media reporting is similarly bereft\nof any sound foundation. Even a methodologically appropriate media analysis (a\ncommon way for SARF to look for evidence of amplification), such as counting\nthe word \u2018Zika\u2019 on Twitter, needs some mechanism to decide how many \u2018Zikas\u2019 are\ntoo many. To their credit, the authors of the Zika paper fully acknowledge this\nshortcoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adding to the confusion, SARF introduces the flip side of amplification to describe risks that receive too little attention. Unfortunately, without a useable scale, preferably with a helpful mid-point between amplification and attenuation, or benchmark that risk management efforts might aspire to, analysts only have tools which are based upon subjectivity to decide whether anything is being amplified or attenuated. This is not straightforward. Unsurprisingly, in most controversial cases there is disagreement about proportionality. From marine incidents to disease outbreaks, with fracking, Fipronil and Brexit along the way, experts and lay persons alike are typically divided. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some say we need to raise awareness of such issues; others say the risk is being exaggerated; and, perhaps one or two others who are in the middle will view the current response as about right. Agreement is rare, and may only emerge after the event when disaster has either struck or been avoided. Soberingly, we see evidence of coming together following the Grenfell Tower disaster, around which a consensus has emerged retrospectively, that the risk had gone under the radar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I should point out that SARF has been used to reflect on social processes involving perceptions of risk and the role of the media. Such matters are rarely presented in purely quantitative terms and it would be wrong to think about SARF in terms of objective miscalculations or misrepresentations. <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n While a cruise ship operator might legitimately point to low probabilities of serious incidents, there is no objective sense in which I can be wrong if I say, \u2018the government should do more\u2019, or even histrionically \u2018it was like the Titanic!\u2019 People are inevitably going to worry as much or as little as they please, and risk appetites are notoriously wide-ranging regardless of scientific understanding. My partner, who is a statistician, is a more nervous flyer than I am. Does her more sophisticated understanding of the relevant probabilities make her wrong and a risk amplifier, or am I wrong and a naively optimistic attenuator of aviation risk? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Beyond these variations between individuals in levels of anxiety, many societal risk controversies, which SARF seeks to explain, essentially have a political dimension. How much ought to be done about marine safety, Zika, Fipronil tainted eggs, fracking or GM food, are of course all questions that can benefit from robust scientific evidence. Yet in the real world they will all, like other issues demanding public attention, ultimately be subject to political priorities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The anthropologist Mary Douglas best articulates this view in terms of the \u2018cultural theory of risk\u2019<\/a>. More recently, Andy Stirling<\/a> (always well worth reading) takes an equally political perspective on risk. These authors get to the heart of the matter. Regarding political controversy as disproportionate to objective risk can, if we\u2019re not careful, privilege techno-scientific institutional interests over legitimate, democratic freedoms. To label a risk amplified<\/em> is, in practice, to stigmatise the framing; conversely, the way to promote more risk mitigation for an issue is to claim that it is going under the radar, that it is not attracting the appropriate attention, or in SARF terms, that it is being attenuated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alongside \u2018louder\u2019, SARF ambivalently argues that the\nprocess of social amplification makes risks \u2018riskier\u2019. Amplification, according to SARF, occurs when\nspecific risk characteristics spawn secondary and tertiary risks, typically in\nother sectors of society. For example, falling luxury cruise ship bookings may\nhave far-reaching effects on ship-building, or the fortunes of coastal resorts.\nThe Framework expresses this through an additional metaphor of ripples in a\npond. Ripple effects might include political fall-out \u2013 an unfortunate government\nminister might have to resign. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, SARF faces the immediate problem that the amplification metaphor is ill-fitted. While most people readily understand interconnectedness \u2013 \u2018for want of a nail the shoe was lost\u2019 (as the poem goes), this isn\u2019t what amplification<\/em> brings to mind. The utility of the metaphor weakens further at the other end of SARF\u2019s spectrum. If amplification<\/em> means \u2018riskier\u2019, its flip side, attenuation<\/em>, also seems to mean riskier since risks that go under the radar are clearly also consequential in terms of tertiary effects. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many disasters have been compounded because concerns were ignored or played-down. Viewing Grenfell Tower as \u2018less risky\u2019 while it was not in the public eye appears both a perverse and disturbing framing of this recent tragedy. In short, the amplification metaphor simply isn\u2019t flexible enough to describe the complexity of real-world risk controversies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, some risks have more repercussions than others, but\nthis is not generally down to the newsworthiness of corresponding event characteristics<\/em>, as SARF would\nhave it. In many risk episodes the major disruptor seems to be uncertainty\nabout its likelihood or magnitude. This is unsurprising considering that risk\nis often defined as uncertainty about likelihood or magnitude. In the face of uncertainty about the scale or\nnature of a risk, experts often simply \u2018get it wrong\u2019. In many instances it is\nnot the characteristics of an event about which the shouting was too loud, but rather\nwhat we did not know that proved most consequential to the trajectory of the\ncrisis. We can\u2019t argue coherently that the uncertain magnitude of a risk is a\ncharacteristic of the risk event without floundering into a tautology. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So why not let SARF have it both ways, portraying risk as \u2018louder\u2019 and \u2018riskier\u2019 at the same time. In practice, mixing the electronic metaphor of signals and receivers with the naturalistic metaphor of stones in ponds seems to be where most SARF-based studies end up. But, rather like mamma in my favourite JJ Cale song, I don\u2019t much like the band \u201call playing at the same time\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/Picture12-700x525.png\")
Louder \u2013 not always clearer<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Some risks slip under the radar<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sceptical.scot\/staging\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/800px-Viking_Sky_Name_Sign_Tallinn_24_July_2017.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nExperts often simply ‘get it wrong’<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Louder and <\/em>Riskier<\/h2>\n\n\n\n