Wounds and witnessing
Last week, a group of graduate students consulted with me on science communication and doctors’ consultations as part of their final project.
They asked about the risks of oversimplification, as well as who had the greatest responsibility in solving the problem of misinformation. Was it the government? Doctors? Social media platforms that allowed health-related misinformation to spread?
The question, however, assumes that the problem of misinformation is simply a lack of information and that communication is simply dissemination.
This misconception of the nature of communication reminded me of my students in Issues in Science Communication last year, who asked for help on their capstone project. A local government tasked them with making videos about antibiotic resistance because people were supposedly misinformed.
The students surveyed families in the health center and came to me with their data. They asked how we could turn the data into a video.
The problem was: even if people liked the idea of watching videos, they actually knew about antibiotic resistance. I advised the students to ask the families about their experiences. No survey, just stories.
What they found was revelatory. When a child was sick, a parent lost income at their job because they were usually employed on a contractual basis. When they were in the doctor’s office, they also felt rushed because the doctors shuttled off prescriptions to keep the line moving.
The families wanted someone to listen to them, to ask them questions about their health, to ensure that whatever was being prescribed was fit for their reality. Instead, they were pressured to be in line for a limited amount of time by their contractual jobs; they were pressured to leave the doctor’s office by the nature of the public health system.
The problem ran deeper than ignorance. It could not be solved by a video, let alone information dissemination.
I remembered these twin experiences at Mass last Sunday, the feast of Christ’s baptism. Our celebrant, Fr. Nono Alfonso, SJ, was also a juror for the 2025 Metro Manila Film Festival. He closed his homily with his reflections on how he and his fellow jurors faced online mockery for awarding Best Picture to “I’m Perfect,” a film that featured multiple actors with Down syndrome.
People called the cast “abnormal” and “mongoloids.” They laughed at the story. Father Nono, therefore, spoke about the baptism of Jesus as God placing himself among sinners—and coming for all of imperfect humanity, regardless of disease or gender.
“Even them,” Father Nono said, referring to those with Down syndrome, “Jesus came even for them.”
When asked what science communication is, or what communication is, for that matter, most people will jump to “disseminating information for the lay public”—as though information were the only way to solve problems, as though the public were uniformly ignorant, as though feeding people knowledge would change them.
But if we were to rest on that notion alone, then the job of doctors would simply be to observe a quiet patient and then prescribe a cure. The job of any communication expert would simply be to make pretty things for people to look at and go, “Wow.”
That’s not a doctor’s job, and neither is that a communication expert’s job—not when both of them have to first examine what the problem is by listening to people’s stories, by asking people to articulate their context, by defining the problem according to people’s experiences rather than assumptions.
The doctor is not merely a medicine dispensary or prescription writer; they have to engage their patient in a conversation that allows them, together, to see what the problem is. The communication expert is not merely a creator; they have to engage the public in a conversation that allows them both to see reality.
Communication is witnessing.
So who bears the burden of addressing misinformation? It is a complex issue, exacerbated by a patriarchal culture where people are told not to question authority. It is worsened by an unsupported, unevenly implemented education system. It is deepened by poverty, government corruption, and trolls and paid hacks who can’t write depth or profundity to save their lives.
Everyone has a role, and everyone is equally responsible. Platforms need policing; content creators need regulation; doctors need training; the government needs sound policy; people need to be curious, to listen, to ask about each other’s lives.
Communication is not about mere transference. It is the willingness to understand another person’s world, to witness someone’s life for what it is rather than what one expects it to be. Perhaps that’s why the homily hit me in its final notes: for in assuming that only “normal” people are allowed to be visible, are we also saying that the poor or those born with disabilities must be seen, but not witnessed?
That would be a failure to acknowledge the richness of reality. That would be bearing false witness. That would be playing God.
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iponcedeleon@ateneo.edu
