The Research On Risk Communication

In history, our lives have never been deep influenced by technology than before, and someone even assumed all the human conducts could be done by robots in future. In the end of last century, while many sociologists described the modern world with words like post-modernism, post-industrial society, Beck, Giddens, Lash and other scholars have noticed the crisis behind prosperity and put up the concept of risk society.Risk means the possible harm that may attack individual or group in the future and how people evaluate and judge the possibility. Risk has high uncertainty. It originated from the human decision during the time of modernization and Ulrich Beck, a German sociologist, first put forward "risk society" in his book. Luhmann and Giddens also have made their contribution to the theory.Risk communication, connected with risk society, refers to the degree, significance and meaning of the communicating risk among interest groups which includes the mass media, enterprises, government, the public, experts etc. For the public living in a media-encompassed world, the natural world is constructed by the media. Thus their knowledge of risk depends a lot on the agenda setting of risk on media.There are five parts in the paper. The first part, an introduction to the basic theory, starts from the concepts and features of risk society and communication. The second part briefly analyses the human communication in a risk society and its difference from normal society. The third part, the most important part, focusing on the mass communication in a risk society, explains the importance and its positive and negative role for media to spread risk information. The mass media, a system of social communication, psychological counseling and cultural building, plays a pivotal role in the aspects of noticing, communicating and controlling risk. Meanwhile, risk could be hidden or enhanced by media under different circumstances. Social panic appears when media don't handle the risk communication properly, such as in the poison banana incident and paper bread rumor. The forth part is a case study of sanlu milk powder scandal in which the media showed great ignorance to the public interest and their health. Rather than giving an alert, media and the company worked together to conceal the risk of drinking these poisoned milk powder, which turned many children and family into victims later. The Johnson & Johnson Tylenol case happened in US in 1984 had a totally different way of handling crisis, which built a responsible image and had a larger share of market after crisis. The last part gives advice to the three main bodies in a risk communication, namely, the public, media and government and the enterprises.The paper is a systematic analysis of risk communication, studying the social communicating phenomena from the view of risk communication. With many case studies, the paper points out the gains and loses for media, public and the government in the communication of risk and is expected to find a balance between the social reality and current media communicating pattern in China.