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Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important.

with an interesting set of topics:

• Web/Web 2.0.
  Communication, Social and Information Networks, Wikis, Blogs, Information Overflow, and the Illusion of Knowledge
• Globalization
  Collaboration and Competition in the scientific community, The Global Village, the Limits of Growth, Science and Democracy
• Open Access
  Scientific Publishing, Science Journalism, Framing, and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’
• Sociology
  Ethics, Morals, Trends, and their impact on scientific directions, organization of our communities, fragmentation, feedback, selection, and the ivory tower.
• Miscellaneous and Other
  Teaching, Information storage, Resilience and the next Generation

Programme with links to abstracts here. Time and place: Sep. 8th-12th 2008, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

[via Academic Productivity].

Contacts were fairly common (30% had more than 5 media contacts in the past 3 years) and scientists reported mostly positive interactions, the researchers say. (I’d not really call two contacts per year common, though).

As might be expected, scientists reported “increasing the public’s appreciation of science”, “achieving a more positive public attitude toward research” and “a better-educated general public” as their main motivations for contacts with the media. Also, the problem of trust in journalists was a common issue: “[nine in 10 respondents identified the "risk of incorrect quotation" in stories as an important disincentive, and 8 in 10 felt that the "unpredictability of journalists" was also a problem]“. Now, this is not terribly surprising. More interestingly, only a third of the respondents found media incompatible with the scientific culture, and the proportion of researchers who anticipated positive reactions from peers (39%)was almost as large as that fearing negative peer reactions (42%).

Also interesting is the relation between the quality of available scientific reporting and the degree of satisfaction of the scientists (with their media appearances):

Japanese researchers reported being slightly less “pleased” with their latest appearance in the media than their Western colleagues were, and researchers from the USA and Germany were slightly more “pleased” than British and French scientists  [...] Assessments of media coverage of science in general also varied modestly but significantly by country [...] German and French researchers rated the quality of science coverage most positively, British researchers perceived it most negatively, and U.S. and Japanese researchers took middle positions.

Now, I don’t know about Japanese science journalism, but otherwise the rated quality of science coverage (national, I presume, even if that’s not evident in the text) meshes very well with what I’ve seen so far. There are a lot of serious popular science magazines in Germany and France, compared to for instance Sweden, while more of the English/American reporting seems to end up in the “cool stuff” area. 

I think that if researchers from other countries - ones less well placed on the top-research-countries scale - had been asked, they would have opinions more in line with the British (Germany and France are not really representative for the situation in most countries). Using these results to extrapolate to an arbitrary country would be overly optimistic. But still, positive results in this area is a nice thing.

If the authors had also divided their statistics more clearly in different age/seniority and gender groups, this study would have been even more informative. And if they had included a couple of less prestigious research nations as well… it would have been interesting to see how well the results held up.

Reference: Peters et al, “SCIENCE COMMUNICATION: Interactions with the Mass Media”, Science vol. 321. no. 5886, pp. 204 - 205 (DOI: 10.1126/science.1157780)
 

This discussion arises from time to time (one of its biggest installments ever took place on Scienceblogs last summer), and its content seems to change but little between countries. Its most recent Swedish incarnation takes place on the blogs of journalist Anders Mildner (1st, 2nd), archaeologist Åsa Larsson - and on my blog (here and here).

I mentioned this problem briefly in my PCST session presentation, and argued that blogging would be a solution for the researcher (who would no longer have to fear being misquoted, or in vain try to persuade a journalist to let them into a newspaper/magazine/TV- or radio show). Mildner also argues that more researchers should use social media to reach out to the public.

I am not sure it solves the underlying conflict of interest, however. And how would it help the journalists?

Within a few years, science blogging has emerged as a new genre for science communication. But is science blogging really best understood in terms of ’science’ and ‘the public’? Or does the phenomenon of science blogging suggest other dichotomies? This paper argues that ’science communication’ is better conceptualized in terms of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’. Science is financed and managed by a network of national and transnational state organisations and corporations, while the overwhelming number of laboratory and field workers constitute a global knowledge proletariat. These different positions in the global ’scientific field’ entail two different domains of communication practices which correspond, roughly, to the cultures of ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’, respectively.

Thomas

Computer simulation and large-scale data analysis used to be the province of scientists proper. Distributed computing is a kind of public engagement with science that involves large numbers of participants. The worldwide user-base of citizens interested in donating computer power to protein science and bioastronomy are modern examples of the mutual interaction between scientists and nonscientists. This paper will look into questions such as why people decide to collaborate in the distributed computing projects and analyze the discourse surrounding bioastronomy and proteomics. It will look at how ideas about protein dynamics and bioastronomy are articulated through various participatory platforms: weblogs, computer fora, wikis, YouTube videos and the Folding@home software. The paper also analyses the flow of skills from subsets of the user pool into the core of the distributed computing project, suggesting that a group of users have knowledge about the intricacies of software technologies that have been useful in the evolution of the Folding@home project.

(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