It was published in the BSHS's Viewpoint publication in June 2009.
I thoroughly enjoyed writing this and I'd be interested to know of other people's opinions on science the changing perceptions of its role in society. And since starting work for a digital media company, I've been increasingly wondering what kind of role social media will have in shaping the future of science. Social media platforms like Twitter and Academia.edu are changing the way in which all people, from your average physics undergraduate to your University professor, share, critique and consume knowledge. But the classic peer to peer circle has been blown wide open by the open source sharing of information through blogging by scientific journalists, science enthusiasts and its critics. The huge growth in the use of social media has given a voice to every man and his proverbial dog. And this ability to share and access information is changing the face of just about everything in society, including ecomonics and politics (just look at wikileaks...).
Where social media once may have been seen by some as the refuge of the self-indulgent (and those who like to tell everyone what they had for breakfast), there are now highly influential people from all walks of life heavily engaging with the public via social media platforms such as Twitter. Manchester's own Prof Brian Cox and American physicist Michio Kaku both have a significant presence on Twitter with large followings. So how, and is, their presence on Twitter altering the public perception of science? How does the way in which scientific communities generally engage with social media influence the public perception of science? Does social media engagement make science more accessible to the layman? Or could it damage the autonomy of science through its dissemination via more casual and nontraditional formats? The debate around the relationship between science and the public, and the responsibility of scientists to communicate effectively was more recently taken up by eminent Sir Paul Nurse in Horizon: Science Under Attack, of which I could write a whole other blog post around (and probably will) but I'll wrap it up for now. Although... what's your view of the future of science and social media?
I think that communication between the scientific community and the general public needs to be vastly improved, and so perhaps social media has the potential to be part of that. In my opinion there is a paucity of accessible, and reliable, scientific information available to the general public. And the scientific community is, on the whole, quite remote and I think engages very poorly with laypeople. Scientific language is typically highly specific and I think tends to obfuscate concepts, which is further compounded when you have reports of conflicting scientific viewpoints.
ReplyDeleteSo, I think social media potentially offers a way to redress that and interact directly with the general public. Rather than being these obscure individuals quoted in the odd newspaper article, it makes scientists tangible figures. Science endeavours help to shape our understanding of the physical world around us, our health, our technologies, our universe (!) and people are unsuprisingly interested in such findings... but such interest will be stifled if there is limited access to such knowledge.
I can't see it being a damaging force, if anything it should lead greater dissemination of ideas and therefore, hopefully, inspire discussion.
I'd have to disagree with Morag on this somewhat, although not wholly. I don't think there can be an immediate relationship between any two separate communities - all communication is mediated, especially one-to-many or many-to-many discussion. So it's not entirely the scientific community's fault if its findings aren't properly disseminated to the wider community. It's actually someone else's job to turn papers and reports into accessible knowledge the rest of us can understand and use.
ReplyDeleteSocial media could be one way (or some ways) of doing this, but not unproblematically. Is Wikipedia, for instance, a social medium? Arguably it is and yet it is notorious for error, error by omission, and opaque use of language. Twitter has become essential to popular scientists such as those you mentioned in your post, Briony, yet I heard a very good point today, saying that bloggers now use Twitter to perform a task they used to use their blogs for - quick posts linking to other articles and news items in between more substantial posts. And much dissemination of scientific (or any other discipline) knowledge on Twitter consists of links to other content, which isn't quite so social: articles on news websites, journals etc.
Beyond dissemination and popularisation, there has to persist a scientific discourse which is highly technical, specific and esoteric. It's only the popularised version which can be simple and (perhaps) fun, and scientists tend perhaps to have different skills to those who can make difficult work accessible. A very few can and have been very successful doing so, but in general this work falls to others.
I also think that the influential power of social media is still vastly overrated. I think newspaper columnists and - worse - anonymous, illiterate and unknowingly biassed copyrighters at the BBC and Metro have a much wider and greater influence over popular thought in areas like science than bloggers of any skill or knowledge level. Ben Goldacre, for instance, seems to spend much of his time exposing the misconduct of his more traditionally tenured colleagues. The overriding popular image of the scientist is still of the boffin, intellectual or nerd who wants to find out why ducks quack more on Tuesdays. Traditional media do a very good job of disseminating ideas about science, but what they actually do is disseminate a version of science which perpetuates its image as being stuffy and irrelevant to everyday life, rather than discussing real scientific developments.