Science blogging as a democratic tool
Abstract presented at the PCST-10 Conference i Malmö, June 26, as part of the session “The Public Engagement of Science and Web 2.0”
(Full abstract title: Beyond the “cool stuff”: science blogging as a democratic tool)
Traditionally, media’s reporting of non-medical science rests on a small subset of articles published in a few of the major journals; with a heavy emphasis on the “cool stuff” and often also framed in a way which is poorly adapted to science reporting. The common use of the scientist as an aloof, impersonal expert does little to foster interaction between the scientific world and the public. In contrast, blogging leaves the choice in the hands of the blogger – blogging researchers can decide for themselves what to say, how and when. The blog by its nature is personal and interactive, making it a convenient and attractive platform for contact between scientists and laymen.
Outside of the scientific world, access to published research is very limited: few persons have the expensive journal subscriptions and superior grasp of specialist English required. Scientists blogging in
their native language can do much to alleviate this gap. Furthermore, science blogging – especially interactions between science bloggers - can incorporate and spread other underreported fundamentals of the research process, such as patterns of reasoning and how to judge the validity of results.
Malin Sandström
PhD student (Computational Neuroscience) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden
Science blogger (in Swedish) since March 2005
June 28th, 2008 at 1:07 am
Of course, blogging is a very democratic tool, and of course, it is a great opportunity to build bridges between scientists and the public. But I am wondering why it takes so much time. It has been two and a half years now, since Nature itself has published an editorial asking scientists to take a more active part in blogging (and wikis). Many academics has said the same thing, a few with long analysis like Henry Farrell in 2005, the majority in short blog texts or journalistic essay, like ourselves in our book last Fall.
But still, the growth in science blogging is desperately slow, at least in non-English universes, like the one I know (French-speaking) or maybe yours. Maybe scientists needs other arguments? Maybe there are something missing in the way the importance of Internet is communicated?
June 28th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
I think the main problem is credit, and in the extension funding (which partly equals time). Blogging generally doesn’t pay, which means that the time you do spend blogging you could have spent trying to sequre funding for yourself and your PhD students/postdocs - or working enough to get your supervisor’s approval, which is mainly the same thing. Seen from the time-pressed non-blogging researcher’s point of view, I imagine that blogging can seem irresponsible and time-wasting - a sort of Sagan effect, if you will. Internet doesn’t seem to pay.
The benefits of blogging, on the other hand, are mainly visible to those who have already begun to blog. Perhaps the recruitment problem would be less if we could find a way to make the gains of blogging more visible?
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:44 am
I agree with you, funding to blogging would help. But still, the English-speaking universe has, now, probably more than 2000 scientists (or science students) bloggers. And almost none of them is there because of funding. They like it, they want to communicate, they use their free time, or they do it on their work time as a communication (popularization) activity… We don’t seem to have that kind of phenomenon in French (about 20 bloggers, at most), even after all those years. And in Swedish?
July 3rd, 2008 at 12:31 pm
In Swedish, few as well.
And I think this acutally ties into the question of credit: being seen, read and commented on is also a type of credit, and since bloggers often cite each other, the gains of blogging are likely to be seen as bigger for the big blog languages (regardless of subject). Also, many researchers are used to communicating in English, so I suspect there is a cross-language recruitment as well, to the detriment of the non-English science blogosphere.
But many of the >2000 English-writing science bloggers are junior. There is still the separate issue of getting the professors and other senior researchers to blog. They already get recognition for their work, so the increased “awareness” credit for blogging is unlikely to sway them. Here, funding is perhaps a stronger argument.
Also, I think funding is a strong argument if you are a junior blogging researcher and want to get the approval of your supervisor or boss.
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