The failure to communicate the danger of H5N1 has been a running theme on this blog, and the hot-zone countries have been notably unable to get the word out. While urban, educated professionals may understand the problem very well, their own cultural limits evidently keep them from reaching the ordinary people.
Here's a case in point from the Jakarta Post. It's not about H5N1, but the communication problem is clearly the same: Half in Indonesia's remote Papua province unaware of HIV/AIDS. Excerpt:
Researchers found HIV infection rates in Papua were as high as 3.2 percent in mountainous areas, compared to 1.8 percent in easily accessible low-lying areas, indicating a higher risk in isolated farming communities where education is poorest.
Researchers found 48 percent of Papuans were unaware of HIV/AIDS. That figure rose to 74 percent of those who did not attend or complete elementary school.
"Exformation" is a useful word, invented by a Danish writer named Tor Norretranders. Exformation is the information you leave out of a message because you know the other person already has it. This is why I never have to explain to my wife that we were married on April 8, 1966 (also her birthday, by the way, so it's a good thing I've never forgotten it).
When people have the same exformation, it takes very little effort to trigger communication: Last April 8, all I had to say was "Happy Anniversary! Happy Birthday!" and my wife knew what I was talking about.
In the same way, "HIV/AIDS" is instantly understandable to most people with access to TV and print media. After the last 25 years, we've all heard about it.
The problem with shared exformation is that all the sharers think everyone must know what they know. Late in World War II, George Orwell marvelled that a woman in London couldn't recall ever hearing the name "Hitler." We teachers are eternally shocked that our students don't already know what we're there to teach them. (Now I'm also shocked that they never think about the fall of the Berlin Wall.)
So when educated urban professionals, paid for their communication skills, have to reach people in downtown East St. Louis or the Papua highlands, they're likely to assume their target population already knows what's happening today at the Toronto flu conference and in the Nigerian poultry industry.
Well, they don't. To explain AIDS to the Papuans doesn't just mean going back to where North America was in 1980; it means going back to 1880, or 1780. And what's more, you can't enjoy the self-congratulation of despising the Papuans for their ignorance and backwardness. If you had to live under their conditions, you'd be dead in a week or two. And they'd marvel at how ignorantly you'd behaved before you died.
I'm pretty sure that the least-educated Papuans still take part in information networks at least as sophisticated as Facebook. Word of mouth, after all, sustained our ancestors for thousands of generations, and illiterate societies have complex oral cultures.
So the problem with informing the Papuan highlanders about HIV/AIDS, and the Javan villagers about H5N1, isn't their ignorance—it's our ignorance. We don't have their exformation, so we can't talk with them in terms they understand. We're not in their networks; we literally don't speak their language.
We shake our heads about what those poor ignorant folks need to learn, whether in Papua or Shaker Heights. But we had better be ready to learn a thing or two ourselves.
