Alice Bell

I have a guest post over at Matthew Nisbet's new Age of Engagement.

The blog had featured a post about modern fan culture and marketing. I couldn't help but fold this into some thoughts on science communication. Can an awareness of tensions and connections between fan culture and entertainment marketing have applications for work aiming to connect members of “the public” with scientific ideas and communities? I left a comment and Nisbet asked me to expand as a post.

It's something I've thought about a bit over the last few years. I discussed the notion of a rhetorical reference to a community of readers in my PhD, and discussed audience-to-audience interaction with students when teaching courses on science online and science's interactions with fiction. I also wrote an article a couple of years back about branding and children's literature which involved some study of social marketing. I should admit the blogpost was slightly hastily put together though, grabbing through some disparate ideas on something that there probably should be more research into. There's a load more I could say around the topic, I'm still working out how to put them together, and what would make the right case study. I'd love to hear further thoughts (or examples, from science and/ or fan culture), either here of over at the Big Think post itself.

Nisbet's been blogging about science communication for a while. His 'Framing Science' at scienceblogs is mentioned in my list of blog recommendations for prospective students last month). His new blog promises to maintain this interest, but take a broader look at communication, culture and public affairs, as well as reinvigorate his interest in the relationship between science and religion (see his introductory post for more details).

He's been setting up in his new home with a prestigious quantity of posts for the start of term. I've already been interested to read pieces reflecting upon the NYTimes article about peer review, and (re)framings of nuclear power. The Big Think site it is hosted on is sometimes known as the YouTube for ideas, and there are a fair number of videos in blogposts (which I'd say is a good thing, something and plan to experiment with myself in the next year).

So, go read my ramblings on fan culture and public engagement, let me know if you have any thoughts, and do add Nisbet's new blog to your list of regular reads.

A colleague asked me for a list of blogs that next year's science communication MSc students might like to read. I figured the only way to share this information was in a blogpost.

Warning: there is no such thing as a reading list of science blogs, you need to explore for yourself. These are just starting points.

• If there's a hot new biology story, you can bet Ed Yong will have a thorough and humour-filled post over a Not Exactly Rocket Science. He also regularly writes about issues in science and (new) media too, and his recent thread on the origin of science writers should be of particular interest to science communication students.
  
• Another blog everyone recommends (and I'm just going to agree) is Mindhacks. A very joyful neuro/psychology themed read, great for sending you to some of the more interesting ends of the internet.
  
• Two notable science writer bloggers currently developing personal sites after the recent mass-exodus from scienceblogs.com are Brian Switek and David Dobbs. Carl Zimmer's post on the scienceblogs diaspora contains a feast of links to more great writers once of this network (Zimmer's blog is worth a mention in itself too).
• I expect my prospective students to already know Bad Science, and I can also recommend his posterous account. The phenomenon of "bad science" blogging is bigger than Ben Goldacre though, two blogs in particular I'd recommend because they often write about science in the media are Lay Science and Gimpyblog (most of the media discussion goes on his posterous account).
• Fiona Fox of the Science Media Center doesn't blog very often, but when she does, everyone talks about it. On a similar note, Natasha Loder's blog is worth a look, as is Framing Science, from American science communication academic, Matthew Nisbet. Real science media nerds might also like Ivan Oransky's embargowatch.
• The Times & Guardian both have good (though very different) science blogs, note the former now has an "entrance fee". I really like Nature's the Great Beyond, and it is worth keeping track of New Scientist's range of blogs.
• The Science Museum's collections department has a nice blog, as does the Wellcome Trust. (and the Wellcome Library, and the Wellcome Collection...).
• Research Fortnight's Exquisite Life is a must for following UK science policy. It is also worth having a look at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience Blog and the Campaign for Science and Engineering. The Royal Society policy team have just started a blog too, which (I hope) will be worth watching.
  

Twitter is a good way of engaging with the science blogosphere. My "awesome science" list of people who write and/ or link to great science writing on the web should be a useful starting point. Twitter is also brilliant for discussing/ eavesdropping on debates about science in the media and policy, so I can recommend people on my science policy and science communication lists too. Please note, many of these accounts will tweet about other things too.

These links are really just the tip of the iceberg. Or, a small section of a big chunk of ice, as I'm not sure something iceberg-shaped is the appropriate metaphor. I should also add that I don't agree with everything these people blog/ tweet about. Not even close. They do, however, tend to write about topics a science communication student might be interested in. At the very least, they'll point you towards some new ideas and make you think.

Click on a few links here and see who they link to. See what entertains, educates or enrages you. Go, have a play.

This extends my piece on Comment is Free.

Science minister David Willetts recently gave a speech to the Royal Institution. He was asked a question about how he would work effectively with schools and young people (another minister's brief). He started off well before putting his foot in his mouth with this little piece of laziness: “The two best ways of getting young people into science are space and dinosaurs".

It was a flippant point, but indicative of a flippancy which is somehow ok when it comes to "kids stuff" (and pisses me off). It could have been worse. Willetts could have put the space-dinos point the way he did in Portsmoth the previous month: "All the evidence suggest if you're going to get young people into those subjects they are the two most powerful things" (source: local newspaper report).

All the evidence? Really? Er, no. I checked. What "evidence" does exist is deeply flawed and/ or contradicts a love of space-dinos (for very brief discussion see the comment is free piece). It's a seriously under-researched area. There should be a lot more work in this area, and it should be a lot better. Interestingly, many of the CiF comments reflected a tendency in educational discourse to hold personal experience above research that aims to consider a broader range of people. For example: "Dinos and space worked for me". I'm sure they did, and I'm not seeking to devalue that personal experience in any way, but the world is bigger.

I should underline that I wrote this piece because the Guardian asked to respond to recent HESA data, and a perceived problem of attracting women in science. This is a knotty question, there are oodles of issues involved (as Sheril Kirshenbaum's recent blogpost reflects on). I wanted to stress that, in working through all these issues, we have to be careful of making broad statements about gender, age or science.

For example, Susan Greenfield says physics has a problem recruiting girls because girls “want to know about relationships” (yes, in that interview). Maybe she has a point, she's not the only one to say this (some history of debates around this documented in this reader). But “girls” are rather a large set of people to pin down. Educational researcher Heather Mendick found that apparently "hardness" of A-level maths could be part of the (many) appeals of the subject for girls as well as boys. Of course, Mendick’s study is of girls who have chosen to study maths, not the ones who had been put off. But we can’t ignore those already-interested either. That's really my point: if you're worried about inspiring the next generation of scientists, boys or girls, you need to listen to young people, in all their diversity. You can't just rely on your own experience, you have to let yourself be surprised by your audience.

Further, to pick up on the "generational issues": as I say in the CiF piece, a lot of children's media (be it books, tv, museums, school exams) can seem a generation or two behind. There is a long history of analysis of spotting this in literary/ media studies. Jacqueline Rose wrote the book on it. Her study of Peter Pan is subtitled "the impossibility of children's literature", arguing children's literature is produced and controlled by adults, so it reflects an adult's idea of the child (it's not "children's" at all, it belongs to the grownups). Personally, I much prefer David Buckingham's extension of Rose's idea. He applies the idea of "impossibility" to Timmy Mallett and argues that kids tv presenters who try to appear "down with the kids" as largely acting out a role of what they think children are and will like; a form of "generational drag". There's always a bit of "dressing up" involved.

So, let's not fool ourselves into thinking that projects like I'm a Scientist or SciCast are somehow simply bottom up, or (more ridiculous) a clean articulation of what children are "naturally" interested in. It's worth noting quite how connected to the school curriculum the SciCast films are (maybe that's a good thing though, a sign that aspects of the school science system are working, at least in places). Equally, we shouldn't write off these projects because of adult involvement either. Education is largely a matter of passing on ideas from one generation to another, but SciCast and I'm a Scientist involve young people as active participants in this, letting young people express their own interests. That's why I mentioned them on CiF. The question banks in I'm a Scientist and SciCast's films provide some rough idea of what aspects of science today's young people find exciting. In the absence of much more decent work in the field, they are one place to at least get some clue of what inspires young people.

Having run a series of short interviews with UK-based science bloggers, I've also talked to a couple of colleagues who are developing research on the 'bad science' blogging community.

Jon Mendel is a geographer at Dundee with a background in studying networks, virtual war and security. Interested in how new media are functioning or not functioning in the case of science blogs and in the role and efficacy of networked forms here.

Hauke Riesch researches public understanding/engagement/involvement/awareness/whatever of science and risk at Cambridge, having previously written a PhD on philosophy in popular science books. Among other things. Next to everything social to do with risk and new technologies, he is interested in how scientists think about science, how they communicate it, and how they think about communicating it.

Firstly, can you give us some idea of the methodology you applied to your study?

We drew on our participation in and observation of the development of this community, from its establishment through to some of the interesting activism episodes in which the community participated.

We used an e-mail qualitative survey: we emailed a list of questions to established members of the community on their blogging activities and their thoughts about science blogging in general and this community in particular.


The paper you presented at the Science and Public conference started by noting there is a lot of hope surrounding science blogging - what do you think those hopes are?

Blogging in general has attracted a lot of hope about how it can democratise the public sphere: anyone can in principle get themselves and their ideas heard and the small army of potential fact-checkers and arguers can shed light on issues where we would previously have relied on a small and overworked group of professional journalists. However there may be barriers inherent within the very concept of blogging that prevent this - there is just so much out there that important contributions can easily be drowned out. These goals are quite neatly summarised and evaluated by Sunstein who concludes that they have not been realised at least to the extent that had been hoped.

In the context of blogging about science, similar hopes are often expressed: some argue that blogging can give individual scientists a voice for their views and opinions and therefore enable them to contribute directly to the national conversations about science and science policy. Related to that, science blogging is often seen as a way for scientists to free themselves from demands of publishers or journalists and others who usually control the flow of information between science and public, so that they can communicate their science directly to the public and allow the public to engage more easily with them. These ideas are also often linked to the free-access movement: Scientists are encouraged to blog directly about their science because ultimately the public pays for it and has a right to know about what science finds. Science blogging does give more people an outlet to write about science - allowing lots of good material to be placed online, though also lots which is less good.

The science bloggers with whom we have discussed our research are also interested in science blogging as offering opportunities for activism, engagement and the development of communities. Bloggers are seeking to use science blogging to engage with and challenge the main-stream media and various other actors.


What do you think are the limitations of these hopes?

As has been noted by some of the bloggers in this community, blogs have relatively small audiences compared to many mainstream media outlets. Blogs can also be left communicating with a relatively narrow audience, such as those already highly interested in science (although whether this is a problem is debatable: Racing Post isn't seen as a failure because of its relatively narrow audience). As things stand, we do not see convincing evidence that science blogs offer a replacement for the mainstream media - although they can be a useful supplement, partner and challenge to it (and some of the bloggers in this community would challenge the distinction between blogs and the mainstream media). Talk of the 'dead tree press' etc. seems, in this context, highly premature.

The efficacy of science blogs' activism is also unclear. Bloggers have been involved in some notable successes - for example, the Singh-BCA libel case - and have been able to organise effectively in order to offer strong challenges to much better-resourced opponents. On the other hand, some have questioned whether initiatives such as #scivote have been effective (and there are interesting links here between 'science activism' and people's broader political goals - some people are less than happy about having the Conservatives in government). We tried to intervene ourselves with regards to aspects of BIS's Science: So What? So Everything initiative (see e.g. coverage in Times Higher and a piece on the Times' science blog) but we now have FOIA responses which show how little impact academics and bloggers had with regards to some problematic aspects of the campaign. We are not sure what solutions there might be here.

We should emphasise that there is a fairly high degree of self-reflection in the community we studied and that bloggers are often quite critical themselves about the limitations of certain practices. We would want to avoid judging the successes/failures of this community in relation to overly-utopian hopes largely generated from outside of the community: there have been some notable achievements, although a small community of science bloggers seems unlikely to turn the science media into a 'dead tree press' in the immediate future.


Can you tell us a bit about who the sorts of people who blog about science are, or at least what the backgrounds and motivations of the bloggers you studied are?

We lack the knowledge to answer about people who blog about science generally: this is a large area that we haven't studied in enough depth, and many prominent bloggers are also anonymous. There is generally something of a lack of research on science blogs.

The community we studied has established norms on writing about science which emphasise accuracy, reliance on evidence and 'letting the facts speak for themselves'. In addition, there is a focus on getting things done: science blogging within the community is not just about writing, but also about campaigning on related causes - this activist element may be a distinguishing feature of this community of science bloggers. There is also an interesting approach to ideas of authority here: ideas of individual authority are largely rejected, but writing instead takes on a
kind of authority through being embedded in a network of blogs, comments, links and research.


Sneaky extra question I asked all the bloggers I interviewed: do you have a favourite blog? If so, what is it? (doesn't have to be a science one).

Mindhacks is excellent for its discussion of a broad range of mind/brain/society-related issues, while Jack of Kent's blog has been a very interesting piece of activism and is an excellent explanation of complex legal issues for laypersons. David Campbell's blog has some good, detailed discussion of issues around politics, geography and multimedia (including some excellent essays on new media/social media). It has also been great to see the development of the 'bad science' blogging community and of the blogs associated with it.

Imran Khan is the Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), the UK's leading advocate for science and engineering policy. CaSE are supported by members from academia, industry, learned societies, and charities.

Imran himself comes from a background of science communication and policy, having written for the Guardian, New Scientist and World Health Organisation, produced for the BBC and the BMJ, and researched in the House of Commons. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Imperial College.

As part of its work, CaSE runs The Science Vote blog. It was originally called CaSE Notes, but was renamed and came to prominence during the 2010 General Election, when it had over 10,000 individual readers.

Do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

The blog has a deliberately niche audience and content, focusing solely on science and engineering policy; whether that be funding, education, the role of Government and Parliament, or related issues. As well as CaSE staff, guest bloggers include science policy professionals, politicians, and working scientists and engineers.

The Science Vote exists to help us achieve our aims of being a voice for the science and engineering community, so our intended audience is fairly specific. The issues we cover are fairly geeky; the intricacies of science funding, speculation on which politicians are interested in the importance of science and engineering, and reviews of science policy events, for instance. We also tend to go into a lot of detail in terms of what we write.

That means that you often not only have to care about the issues we write on, but also be fairly au fait with the background in order to engage with the content. We're quite happy with that model, particularly as it lets us bring in extremely well-informed guest bloggers who don't necessarily have journalistic tendencies.

The S Word blog at NewScientist.com does a brilliant job of exposing the big issues in science policy to a wider scientific audience, and obviously I contribute to that when I can. In comparison, The Science Vote is designed to be a resource for the science policy community and a tool for CaSE, rather than a clarion call.


Do you think there is an increasing appetite for coverage of policy issues in the science blogosphere?

Our readership definitely shot up during the election. Since then, it's dropped off, but is still far higher than anything we had before.

I think all the activity - everything from real-world science hustings to #scivote tweets - got people to twig that that you can't take science and engineering out of politics, or vice versa. If you do, we'll just get sidelined.

So now you have people who were already active in the science blogosphere extending their interest to science policy, because they're passionate about science and therefore recognise the importance of decent science policy.

And it's encouraging that activity levels now are fairly high. Before the election you had a fairly characterful set of Science spokesmen for the three big parties, and you also had the looming election, so science policy was bound to get a lot of attention.

Whereas now it looks like the Lib Dems won't have a formal science spokesman, and Labour don't have theirs yet. But in autumn we'll learn what the science budget will look like, as well as who Willetts' Labour shadow will be, so I'd imagine you'll see even more of an appetite later in the year.


Are there people or institutions in science policy you'd like to see start a blog? (and/ or topics you think should be covered more?)

I think it'd be very interesting to see a blog which takes a close look at the use and misuse of science in politics. Some debate in Parliament is excellent. But some of it is frighteningly bad, particularly when it betrays a lack of some very basic understanding of the nature of evidence. But I think you'd need to be fairly closely linked to Parliament to be able to keep an eye on what's going on there.

One of the subjects which our blog tries to raise the profile of is diversity in STEM. It's an appalling statistic that only one in ten engineering graduates are women, and we have similar problems with socio-economic and ethnic diversity. I think most of us would agree that there's a 'universality' about science that means it can bridge divides, but in many respects we're failing to. Though I'm not sure a dedicated 'diversity blog' is what I'm arguing for; diversity in STEM shouldn't be a balkanised issue, but one which you can weave into different aspects of science policy.


Finally, back to that #scivote hashtag. In terms of political campaigning around science, do you think microblogging (i.e. twitter) is more important than standard blogging, or that they play different/ supporting roles?

There's always a danger when you do anything via twitter that you think "Great, that's ticked off then", forgetting you're only dealing with a subset of the community. And although tweeting is useful in getting the word out and discussion, you can't really do policy analysis and argument in 140 characters. So you do need the standard blogging to underpin it.


Sneaky extra question: can you tell us your favourite blog(s)?

My favourite blogs are badscience, the S word, SciDevNet, engadget, mindhacks, kottke.org, cynical-c, and strange maps. Plus a special mention for the Little Atoms podcast, even though it's not a blog.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

See also my list of (UK) science policy blogs on posterous.

Mun-Keat Looi is a Science Writer at the Wellcome Trust and one of the editors of the Trust's blog. The Wellcome Trust blog aims to tell some of the many stories about the wide variety of people, projects and events that the Trust funds. Everything and everybody from new PhD students to senior scientists, genetics to the impact of the environment on health, science, art, history, museums plays and films.

Do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

Audience for us is a difficult one because we have so many! Our core audience is the people we fund (or are interested in obtaining funding from us), but even that can include artists, writers and filmmakers as well as scientists of different disciplines. Part of what we want to do is introduce people to the other things we fund, outside of their own fields, be it neuroscientists to genetics or sculptors to biochemistry. As a science writer I hope I write in a way that is interesting and accessible to any general reader, and this is something we try to reflect in the blog. Anybody from any background could be reading our posts, so we try not to assume any prior knowledge and just try to convey why we think something is interesting.


Do you have a favourite blogpost ? (as in one you've really enjoyed writing)

I have a few favourites -- it's hard to pick one as we have so many different kinds of posts. Some of them are more like feature articles, talking about things that just wouldn't fit anywhere else in our communications output. For example, I used 'overmatter' from a feature I wrote about synthetic biology to post about what it is like for students to be in the iGEM competition at MIT. That's proved reasonably popular, and I'd like to think it's been of use to people thinking about taking part in the competition.

On the more conventional side, I like the chance to cover some of the brilliant, if less newsworthy, papers from scientists that the Trust funds (those that aren't deemed 'worthy' enough for a press release or full news story). Some of the smaller studies we fund overseas, for example, or genetics studies that aren't headline-making. It's also nice to cover a paper in more depth than in the media -- I wrote one post about cognitive enhancing drugs that the researcher seemed pleased with. She felt the media coverage had distorted her findings and was relieved to have the chance to set the record straight.

Maybe my favourite post is nothing to do with science though. I like being more personal in blogging than in news or feature writing and I've written a few like this for the Wellcome Collection blog. Specifically a few from a China Symposium we ran, which I attended with my Dad and which very much influenced how I reported it afterwards! Blogging's allowed me to cover things and talk to people I wouldn't normally have had a chance to, which is
one of the reasons I value having the blogs as an outlet.

• The student synbio experience
• RSV vaccine
• Genetics with a bite
• Smart drugs smarter students
• China and me

How do you feel blogging for an institution differs from independent or journalistic blogging?

Obviously you have to be a bit more careful about what you say - you're speaking on behalf of an organisation rather than yourself. Having said that, we have deliberately made the Trust blog a community one with 'real' people behind the posts rather than the anonymous news stories we have on our corporate site (and to some extent Twitter/Facebook). We wanted to put more of a personal face to the Trust as opposed to this big amorphous organisation (or hiding behind pictures of dear old Sir Henry Wellcome...).

In terms of what we do, our approach doesn't differ too much from the way a journalist or blogger might approach a story. All of the writers at the Trust have the same objective: to seek out interesting stories and report as objectively as possible (while being transparent about who we work for).

Where the affiliation pays off is, of course, access to many events, meetings, information and people that others may not have. By virtue of being at the Wellcome Trust there's tons of stuff going on that we have access to and could share with others interested in the same things.

Obviously we want to raise awareness of what the Trust does, but we're not the marketing team or the press office (though they do occasionally contribute). I think the way to raise awareness is to let the content (i.e. the people and projects we fund) speak for itself -- find interesting people and interesting stories and don't bang on about yourself all the time. We're lucky in that we've got a reasonable amount of license to say what we want on what we find interesting, so long as we stay sensible and relevant to the Trust's interests.


Do you feel you differ from blogs from corporate a institution? (or sponsored blogs for that matter?)

I've pondered a lot on how the blogging we do is similar or different to other 'corporate' blogs and other charities' blogs like CRUK, who have a more defined audience. The recent ScienceBlogs Pepsigate scandal raised a lot of questions. As many have said, it may have been different if PepsiCo were upfront about it being marketing from the start, or started a blog genuinely exploring the food science behind their products from a more independent perspective. Institution blogging is an interesting area and I hope to hear more people's thoughts on this at the event.


Finally, care to share your favourite blogs?

Not Exactly Rocket Science, Genetic Future, Cancer Research UK Science Blog, Times Science Blog (before the paywall), Wellcome Library Blog, Alice Bell (no, really*)

As for a non-science blog, it's Kirainet, which is one of several places I go to for amusing/ interesting/ geeky/ weirdo Japanese stuff. A good example of a blog which is pretty straightforward in terms of writing, but the content is so interesting it pretty much speaks for itself. I'd mention others, but am slightly afraid of giving away how much of a dork I really am....


* I paid him to say this.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

After completing his PhD in 2008 in Australia, Daniel moved to the UK to take up a position at the Sanger Institute, the largest genomics research institute in the country. His day job revolves around the analysis of DNA sequence data from projects like the 1000 Genomes Project, and figuring out ways of using these torrents of data to help inform studies of human disease. His blog Genetic Future focuses on the personal genomics industry: companies offering to sell you information about your own genome, for purposes ranging from learning about your ancestors to predicting your risk of serious diseases.

First question: Do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

This is something that has really evolved over time as I started to get to know my readers. Initially I had a very vague idea of potential readers - basically anyone interested in genetics, I suppose - but I found it very hard to write about the things I was interested in without implicitly requiring some kind of background knowledge from the reader. I also started to accumulate a great group of regular commenters with expertise in the field, a combination of self-educated genetic hobbyists and people with more formal training, and that's the level that I ended up pitching most of my posts.

I'm never sure if I've found the right balance, but it's certainly made it easier for me to write about the scientific and commercial aspects of genomics to not have to build in a huge amount of introductory material for every post.


Is there anything about your composition style, or choice of subject matter which you feel has changed over time? (as you have got to know your readers, or for other reasons).

Yes, absolutely. When I started the blog I initially focused on genetics more broadly, with an emphasis on the scientific issues. As time has gone on I've focused more and more on the commercial side of things, spending a lot of time discussing companies involved in direct-to-consumer genetic testing and DNA sequencing. To some extent this shift has been reader-driven, but mostly it's just a reflection of how my own interests have changed over the last couple of years.


Changing track a bit. You've written about some of the difficulties of scientists (live) blogging conferences. Do you feel there is a role for blogging in opening up business as well as science? Equally, do you feel especially constrained ever as a science blogger who focuses on commercial issues?

There's definitely a role for scientifically-literate bloggers in opening up the commercial world to public scrutiny. One scathing post from a blogger laying out the deficiencies of a company's genetic test can end up dominating Google search hits for that company's name, which then means potential consumers doing even the most superficial web research before buying can quickly get access to informed criticism. That's incredibly important in a field as complex as genetic testing, where most consumers aren't really in a position to make a fully informed decision - having independent, expert reviews out there on the internet can make it a lot easier for people to make the right choice.

That said, with power comes consequences. It's easy to forget that what you say as a blogger can have a major impact on the companies you write about: one bad review of a new sequencing technology could sometimes be enough to dissuade a key investor from buying in, for example. When that sort of money is at stake the consequences of mis-reporting are pretty serious, so I'm now always quite careful to make sure what I say about a company is carefully-phrased and well-justified. I don't always get that right when I'm writing in a hurry or if I'm particularly outraged by a dodgy product, but I try.


Can you imagine more corporate-based science blogging, in similar ways science charities like Cancer Research UK or the Wellcome Trust blog? (esp. the former, as their news blog works to act against google results of "bad" health news messages they would like to combat?)

There are already some quality corporate science blogs out there - a particularly good example in my field is The Spittoon, run by direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe. However, it's hard for corporate blogs to stay on-message without either being boring or looking like PR shills for their company. I'd definitely like to see more companies out there blogging, but if they do so they're going to have to learn to give their bloggers a reasonably long leash and be prepared to deal openly with controversy in the comments section. It's tough to get the balance right, but companies that do it well can get a lot of respect (and business) as a result; unfortunately, companies that get it wrong (as Pepsico did this week) can find themselves in a world of pain!


Finally, can you tell us your favourite blog? (it doesn't have to be a science blog)

I'm a nerd, so all of my favourite blogs are science blogs! It's very tough to pick a single winner, so I'll name three instead: for general science I'd have to say Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science, for my field of research I think John Hawks' excellent palaeoanthropology blog, and for personal genomics I have only good things to say about the Genomics Law Report.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist at University College London. In her spare time, she is also a novelist, freelance science writer and communicator, broadcaster, sci-lit-art pundit and editor of the science-culture webzine LabLit.com. She has blogged at Mind The Gap on Nature Network since 2007. Jenny leaves reporting of the facts and figures of scientific research in the capable hands of her science blogger colleagues. Instead, she prefers to focus on issues of the scientific profession, using her blog to reveal what her day-to-day life in the lab is like – the good, the bad and the ugly.

So, starter question, do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

Because I am writing about my life as a scientist, I try to pitch it so that anyone can understand it. I am sure that a large portion of my audience currently consists of fellow scientists, given the Nature Network environment, but I do hope that as my blog becomes more well known, I will reach beyond that inner circle. On the other hand, it almost doesn’t matter if anyone is listening; I have kept a paper diary since I was a child, and for me blogging is an extension of that. Although I try to write in a way that will please other people, I ultimately do it because I love – and even need – to write for myself.


Can you remember what first inspired you to make the move from personal "paper diary" to blog?

I was actually a very late adopter of the whole Web 2.0 thing. I didn't really consider it until I was approached by Nature Network and asked if I would blog for them. At first, being pretty time-poor, I was against the idea of yet more writing commitments. But the more I thought about it, the more attractive the idea seemed. I do a lot of freelance writing, and one of the most frustrating things about it is, after taking great care to perfect exactly what you want to say, having to see your writing slashed and rearranged by editors and sub-editors, some of whom don't really share your sense of craft or style. It suddenly dawned on me that having a blog, I could be the master of my own literary domain. It was a great feeling of freedom!


You mentioned the "inner circle" of Nature Network. (a) What do you feel are the advantages of that community of readers/ other bloggers? (b) Do you have any ideas/ plans for ways other audiences might come to your blog?

I think the only way that the social internet is made bearable is by its propensity to consolidate into small communities; much like a real flesh-and-blood conference, beyond a critical mass of participants it all gets unwieldy and impersonal. It doesn't matter to me how many readers read my blog -- the more the merrier -- but when it comes to direct interactions, I would be much happier interacting with a close-knit group of a few dozen regular commenters rather than hundreds. The more comments a blog attracts, the higher it seems the chances of getting nasty. But if you have come to know your community, people behave much more like they would face-to-face: that is, with the normal codes of courtesy. Also, I like to respond to all comments personally, and if there were too many people it would be impossible.

I would like my blog to be more widely read, though. Recently there have been a few blogs that have touched a nerve and spread via Twitter -- my organization of "Spoof Simon Jenkins Monday", for example -- and this has really increased traffic my way, exposing my blog to people who wouldn't normally come across it. So Twitter has become an excellent way to amplify any important messages my blog may be sending out.


Do you think your experience as a blogger has had an impact on your approach to other writing?

Blogging has definitely honed my style. I've written a lot of fiction, and I've written a lot of science news, and blogging is somewhere in the middle: like news reporting, you need to capture your audience quickly and to be very brief (I really think a good blog post shouldn't be longer than 300-400 words), but like fiction, you want to express something elusive and emotional in the most original way you can. Blogging has helped me to experiment more with humor, which I find has helped with certain scenes I've been working on in my third novel. Above all, blogging has really exercised the basic craft: I can now knock off a fairly polished blog post in under fifteen minutes, and I find that writing everything else has also sped up accordingly. It's almost as if that part of my brain is just permanently primed and ready for action.


Finally, can you tell us your favourite blog?

My favorite blog is Confessions of a (former) lab rat, because it's got a righteous anger and rebellious edge that I wish I could muster. I'm always a little afraid of causing offence, but Confessions never shies away from being controversial or -- when the need arises -- even a bit rude.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

On the run up to the science blogging event I'm chairing on Thursday, I thought I'd do a series of short interviews with four UK science bloggers who, in addition to our panel, reflect some key areas in the UK science blogosphere.

I've started off with the same question to all of them: do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog? Subsequent questions then flow from that answer and/ or the specific type of blogging they do. I've also asked each of them to share their favourite blogs.

I'll make their names into links when the interviews go live:

• Jennifer Rohn, who keeps a "life in the lab" blog on Nature Network.
• Daniel MacArthur, who blogs about the genetic testing industry on ScienceBlogs.
• Mun Keat Looi, who writes on an institutional blog for the Wellcome Trust.
• Imran Khan, who blogs about UK science policy as Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering.

Additionally, I asked social scientists Hauke Riesch and Jon Mendel to tell me a bit about their research into the science blogging community.

If you're interesting in this sort of thing, I can also recommend this set of mini-interviews with psychology bloggers from British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog. Also, a couple of recent science-related profiles from Normblog: Gimpy and Jack of Kent.

We released a few more tickets for the blogging event, so if you thought we'd sold out, there is still a chance to sign up.

Beck Smith of the Biochemistry Society and I would like to invite you to our Science Blogging Talkfest, Charles Darwin House, WC1N, 15th July. Registration is free, and online.

We'll start at 6pm with drinks, chat and cake over registration. From 7-8:30pm, we'll move into the lecture theatre for the debate. Then I thought we might go to the pub.

As several people have already pointed out, our panel is entirely made up of bloggers: Petra Boynton, Jon Butterworth, Mark Henderson, Alok Jha, Andy Lewis, Ed Yong. This is something we're actually quite proud of.

I've noticed that a lot of debates around this issue have got stuck in questions of blogging vs "traditional" journalism, which missed out on the chance to talk about blogging as something real, something that is happening (has been happening for a while) and is both exciting and problematic in its right. This isn't necessarily a big old love-in, it is a chance to grow. Neither is this to say that blogging vs. journalism isn't a debate still worth having. You go off and have it if you're interested. We want to talk about blogging. And we have cake.

Maybe we are "limiting" the scope of the debate slightly by framing it with a panel of bloggers. But there is only a limited amount of things any group of people can say in a few hours. I quite strongly believe that far from stifling a debate on blogging, this focus will encourage something more meaningful.

As Alok Jha tweeted: the strength of the project is that there'll be no time wasted on definitions, more sharing of constructive ideas. I also happen to think there are a host of in-fights, debates, differences, mis-understandings and discontinuities within science blogosphere which get glossed over when it is put in a position where it has to defend itself.

We'll be asking the audience for questions on the day, but I'd really like hear some in advance too. Please put them in the comments below (or email me). I should also stress that we want audience members to comment on questions, and answer them too. This isn't going to be an event where we all sit waiting for the panellists to impart their great wisdom, I'm planning on drawing on the knowledge and ideas of the audience too.

You can reserve a place here. Do come, and let me know any questions in advance.

This weekend, I had a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free site about open data and public engagement. I wanted to emphasise that a simple opening up of scientific data doesn't work as a public engagement strategy. The people who can such data sets aren't necessarily "the public".

Not that an entity called "the public" necessarily exists anywhere much outside of rhetoric (but maybe that's an another issue). My point is that simply allowing access to data doesn't on its own open science up, or it only opens it up to a small number of people already pretty close to scientific work. I don't think that this in itself means open data is a bad thing in terms of making science more publicly accountable. We do, however, need to think in detail about how we expect such data to be used (anywhere really, but for me, specifically when it hits a "public sphere"), especially its reach.

Even if we could get around all the pragmatic and ideological issues surrounding open access (and I'm so not getting into that hear), it doesn't necessarily mean we'd all know what to do with it. Information, on its own, it is inert. It is what you do with it that counts. Opening data sets doesn't necessarily unlock the craft of knowledge-making. Neither, in the context of climategate my CiF post was inspired by, does it make the craft of scientific work all that more "transparent."

A couple of points worth expanding on:


1) Expertise

As Kieron Flanagan noted on Twitter, my comment is free piece had more than a whiff of Harry Collins about it. Harry Collins is a sociologist of science who focuses on expertise. An expert on expertise, if you will. He is keen to argue that expertise is "real", that experts are people with special skills which often require large amounts of tacit knowledge, that is in some respects a craft. He also argues that expertise is distributed, and that we can distinguish between "interactional expertise", where you might be able to "talk the talk" of an area of expertise and the "contributory expertise" of active practitioners of a field.

Some of Collins' writing can be a bit dense, especially if you're not used to a sociological approach to jargon, but a lot of his recent work on expertise is available online (so it is accessible in as much as you can download the papers, if not necessarily accessible conceptually). If you find Collins hard, or simply bothered to wade through, I guess it underlines my point that it can take time to understand the sort of complex ideas we generate today, and not everyone has time to learn the tactic skills and knowledge required to develop such understanding. This piece from Physics World (pdf) might help if you're struggling for an introduction.

I don't want to suggest I'm a fully paid up member of the Harry Collins fanclub. To provide full context, my CiF piece was inspired by an event at the Royal Institution, where Adam Corner had cited an interview he had done with Collins. I repeated the basic ideas on expertise articulated via Corner in the CiF piece because it helped me make a point about not being naive when it comes to how contemporary science works. Indeed, I said publicly at the Royal Institution event that I think it's important to note that Collins' approach to expertise is not an uncontroversial one, especially when it comes to thinking about science in public.

So, for a slightly different take on expertise in public, I can suggest these three reports from Demos: Public Value of Science, See-through Science and the Received Wisdom. If you want something a bit more scholarly, try Irwin & Micheal's Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge. Or for more climate-specific points, I enjoyed Irwin's Sociology and the Environment, and there is always his classic book, Citizen Science. The Demos reports are great starters though, and make substantive points in their own right. Accessible in more ways than one (influential and usable too).


2) Monitorial citizenship.

This is an interesting idea. My reference to it has already inspired one blogpost. If you want to read more, see Michael Shudson's (2003) essay ‘Click Here for Democracy: A History and Critique of an Information-Based Model of Citizenship’ (chapter four of this book). Or, a more easily found overview of the idea can also be found in Henry Jenkins' (2008) Convergence Culture, a book I'd recommend to anyone interested in online communication, especially around politics.

To give a brief summary here, Shudson argues our notion of an informed citizen is anachronistically rooted in the context of the last “information revolution”, that of the early 20th century. Then, idea that a voter should learn as much as possible is base on a time where access to information was opening up (mass-media, literacy rates, emancipation), but was nowhere near as open. Now we simply have more data than we can deal with: we are promised with everything, but in reality we can only manage a bit. Should citizens “follow everything about everything?”. Are those who don’t delinquent? “Or, in contrast, could they be judged exemplary if they know a lot about one thing and serve as sentries patrolling a segment (but not all) of the public interest’s perimeter?” (Shudson, 2003: 56). This is where the idea of “monitorial citizenship” emerges (think pencil monitors in school). Here, we each have bits of information, we are each knowledgeable in some particular issues, operating in a self-consciously large and diverse context of mutual trust and shared resources.

This idea is not without its problems, least if all how you get to be a monitor. Let's still with the pencil monitor analogy: a teacher might pick such a person at random, but equally all sorts if classroom politics might be involved in such a decision. (I'm sure we all have childhood memories of injustice where Timmy got to hand out the new exercise books just because he's the teacher's pet). Pencils aside, many science bloggers have at least one if not three degrees in subject, and although each case is individual, all sorts of injustices when it comes to access to that sort of education. They were lucky to have got there, and probably had to put in a fair bit of hard graft too. Perhaps monitorial citizenship is another idea which relies on a more equal education system than we currently have. Still, I like it, it's awareness of the distribution and necessary diversities of expertise is something I think is worth thinking about.


To sum up these two points, I'll repeat my conclusion to the CiF piece, that I doubt a one-size-fit-all model will work when it comes to increasing public trust in science (climate science or otherwise). Although the idea of storming the Royal Society to take back science for the people might seem appealing, I fear it'd be a rather blunt weapon. If you really want action on science's relationships with society, I suspect we'd be better served if we "act local". By local, I should stress, I don't necessarily mean physical space, I mean local in terms of specific issues or shared cultures. We must remember the sheer size and diversity of "this thing we call science": its experts, its ideas, evidence, methods, materials, sites, equipments and its publics. For all that I think science should be shared as far as possibly, it only by small groups of people incrementally doing small things that I imagine much will get done.

I've just given a talk about science communication at an event on public engagement with arts, humanities and social science research.

Although I hoped all the time, money, anxiety and analysis poured into science communication over the last 25 years (250 years...) would mean I'd have something useful to say, I was a bit unsure about it. It's arrogant to assume science communication can tell the rest of the academy how to go about sharing it's research. There are huge differences between communicating the natural sciences and communicating other research areas. For one thing, we shouldn't discount the huge amount of money, professional expertise and institutional support provided by the now huge science communication industry. The standard sociology post-doc just wouldn't have those sort of support systems.

That said, there are similarities too, and I believe there is potentially a lot science communication can learn from attempts to communicate other subjects. For example, Farida Vis' reflections on being trolled by racist online groups has, I think, lots of interesting things to say to those caught up in climategate (Vis' slides are first link here). Also, I say that there are differences between science and everyone else, but it's not as if there aren't huge differences within this big old thing we call science. Epigenetics has a completely different public cultural context to high energy physics. Communicating one synbio project to one audience will be very different from another, to another.

Anyway, it was a difficult gig, so I did the sensible thing and chickened out by getting other people talk for me. Firstly I showed this video by some of my MSc students, which juxtaposes four scientists' ideas about their relationships with the public: one from 1950, one from 1970, another from 1990 and finally, a 2010 point of view.

Debate on science and society from Cecilia Rosen on Vimeo

In particular, I wanted to draw out the difference between the 1990 character's approach and that of 2010: the shift away from talking down to the public and towards a more discursive, interactive and contextual approach: from "deficit model" to "dialogue" to use the sci-com jargon.

There are loads of problems with the 1990 "deficit model" stance, if you really care there are many books and papers summarising them (or this report provides a good overview). Most of the criticisms stressed how simplistic it is to black-box "science" and "the public", and that media audiences tend to contextualise information given to them, sometimes in unpredictable ways. It's often said that the only word in "Public Understanding of Science" anyone could agree on was "of" (and even that had its discontents). Some people objected to the hierarchical set up of the models, which assumed science sits on the top, passing down information to the laity. It was also argued that it doesn't do the advancement of knowledge much good to rely only on scientists: there are useful things to be learned from talking to people without advanced degrees. None of this is to suggest that the public know better than science, just that listening to the occasional outside voice can be useful. To argue against a top-down model isn't necessarily to argue for a singularly bottom-up one (though some people might). If nothing else, going around acting as if your audience are stupid is bad PR. Having a conversation with someone where you build mutual trust, respect and understanding (even if you do not always agree) is, quite simply, more likely to get your voice heard.

However, in showing this video I also wanted to emphasise the way my clever MSc students put the 1950, 1970, 1990 and 2010 attitudes together, making the characters fight it out across-generations. Science communication often likes to pat itself on the shoulder that it's left the problems of the top-down model behind. It hasn't, despite the rhetoric of engagement and dialogue and involvement (and using "deficit model" like it's an insult). More importantly, moving to a more interactive model doesn't solve all our problems, if anything it just creates new ones. There are also several points the older characters make which are still worth listening to. None of this is simple.

I then talked briefly about four science communication projects I thought were worth noting: Colliding Particles, a series of short films exploring the "human stories" of scientists working on the the LHC; Galaxy Zoo, possibly the world's most successful citizen science project; Opal, which uses "community embedded scientists" in a range of interesting ways which both makes and communicates ecology at the same time; and "I'm a Scientist", a dialogue web event which pitches teenagers' questions to scientists. I finished by handing over to Jenny Joplin who works in events at the Wellcome Collection (a fifth science communication project of note). None of these are perfect and you can't necessarily apply their approaches outside of their own specific contexts, but they are all well thought out, successful and (I think) worth a look at.

The twitter tag was #enres if you want to hear what others think/ said at the event, and further blogs/ comments may well crop up on their website.

I've just written a piece on Comment is Free responding to the "How Science Became Cool" feature they ran last Tuesday. This is the sweary bit I couldn't fit in (though with slightly less swearing than when I saw the headline they'd given it and read comment number 3...)

The piece for the Guardian runs through some of the evidence of science's public popularity. But research into science and the public doesn't just provide evidence, it also provides reflection. One basic tenet of such reflection being that the notion of "science" isn't nearly as uniform as is sometimes imagined (for developed theory and a set of historical examples, see this book). Another central tenet is that whether you like, agree and/ or believe in a piece science is largely cultural (classic study of this being Brian Wynne’s sheep farmers). Baring both these points in mind, we should not forget the tensions within the great big Venn diagram of groups which have connected to form the apparent "new" coolness of science.

I think the most illustrative example of this is last December's "Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People". Or, as it later became known for the post-Christmas TV transmission: Nerdstock. I remember hearing people say they much preferred the term Nerdstock, they would have loved to have gone but were put off by the word "Godless" in the title. And yet people wanting to express their atheism were arguably the fuel of the event. Similarly, within self-confessed science fans, there are those with more space-y interests and those who are rather more David Attenborough in their tastes, both sitting alongside each other with some degree of incomprehension. There are also the wades of commentators on the "How Science Became Cool" piece who wined "don't leave science to the cool kids, that's the last thing we want".

These are all tensions, territories and cultural identities we have to remember if considering the movement of science through popular culture. Moreover, I think that the more activist science communicators (i.e. those who want to change peoples minds) need to take seriously those who disagree or are not sure about particular ideas in science. I don't think it's helpful to write them off as anything as broad brush as "anti" the whole of science. This is not to say you have to agree with them, or even display any rhetorical sense of agreement. But you have to think about what precisely they don't like and why if you really want to convince them otherwise. As I wrote in the post about Shell and the Science Museum, throw your hands up in the air with incredulity at their stupidity if you like: see how far that gets you.

I worry that that with a celebration of aesthetics of science the response to "isn’t this cool" will be, from many, "er, no". There's the famous youtube clip of Richard Dawkins saying "Science is interesting, and if you don't like it, you can fuck off." That's great if you already agree with him. It's funny and the appeal to those who "can fuck off" helps emphasise a sense of bonded community by way of noting those aren't in it. But it only puts off those who disagree with you even more. As I've blogged before, I think science communication should say this is awesome because. It should earn and demonstrate wonderment, not assume it.

Of course, another central tenet of science communication research is you shouldn't assume a need to ram science down everyone's throat. Not everyone likes science, not everyone knows much science. And that's ok. Maybe the disinterested can fuck off then, though I can think of a fair few specific examples where I'd rather they didn't (personally, for me: science funding, climate change). It's a difference between liking or disliking that big old complex thing called "science" and having an opinion about a specific scientific issue which I think is the important point here.

I agree the science brand seems to be doing pretty well right now, but let's not get carried away about the novelty or reach of this. Moreover, don't let a sense of glitzy uniformity of a big old thing called "science" obscure the detail in its guts, be this good, bad, useful, pointless, ugly or beautiful. Don’t fuck off if you don’t happen find one or other aspect of it interesting, and please don’t get arrogant or cliquey enough to tell others to do so either.

EDIT 19:45 20th April: just in case you worry I'm quoting Dawkins out of context, he is repeating a New Scientist editor with the "can fuck off" line. There's great context provided in this longer video of the event, which I can heartily recommend anyway (ta Scott)

EDIT (7/4): Videos of the event now up at OpenDemocracy.

I spent the bulk of Thursday at the University of Westminster, learning all about Public Service Media in the Digital Age. A few people asked if I'd liveblog the event on twitter. For various reasons, I decided not to. Instead, this post starts and ends with a few tweet-ish points and gets a bit more reflective/ descriptive in the middle. It's reasonably long. Have a scroll down and see if anything catches your eye.

The photo is from a lunchtime activity, where we were asked to reflect on the issues involved through Lego. It's a link to flickr: click on it if you want more notes.


10:20. Wow the main building at the University of Westminster is GORGEOUS, I'd forgotten it's the old Royal Polytechnic Institution.

10:30. Not even started yet, and I'm already finding myself pulled into an argument on the nature of expertise (re: swine flu).

David Gauntlett kicked off by drawing our attention to the difference between the more traditional "public service broadcasting" and the "public service media" of their title, suggesting the shift from one to the other reflected a shift to a broader media landscape, and one that was possibly more interactive. A notion of "public service", perhaps denotes a rather Reithian "top-down" style of media. David suggested that in the digital age, perhaps public service media institutions should be providing platforms rather than content. There are corners of Youtube which are, arguably, more "public service" than the bulk of BBC or Channel Four output. Yet, YouTube runs at a humongous loss. Maybe the solution then would be a BBC-Tube, or a British-Library-Tube? I'm inclined to think the very idea of a BBC-Tube boarders on tautology, but the explicit contradiction of such an idea is also what makes it a powerful point.

Appropriately enough, next up was Richard Deverell from the BBC. He underlined the shift in language, noting that the new "Media City" (Salford) reflects a more open and interactive media landscape than "Broadcasting House" or "Television Centre". He provided a nice anecdote about writing a report in 1995 for John Birt on "the information superhighway". Birt promptly flew to the US, spent three days chatting in Bill Gates' garden and came back a zealot for "online". He also provided a neat analogy for the difference between on-demand and "linear" broadcasting: it's like a supermarket saying you can only buy chocolate digestives at 7pm on a Thursday. He finished with a seven point manifesto for media in the digital age. Some highlights of which were: embrace the technology and technologists because software engineers are the new creatives; be as audience focused as possible (including loads of audience research); and do less, but do it better (including exploiting the archive).

Someone asked if Deverell felt there was a tension between "quality" and an uptake of user-generated content; that he worried about losing the BBC's editorial control? The answer was simple: yes, a huge tension. This is why he felt there will never be a BBC-Tube, but it's a tension we have to deal with. Another interesting question focused on news: one of the features of the web is that it is a post-modern medium, that it challenges the idea of a single truth narrative, how can you therefore say online news is more impartial? Deverell's answer was that online news could bring more diverse sources (so, he would agree it fractures truth narrative, but maybe provides closer to truth? Gave me flashbacks to reading Karl Popper and/ or Jay David Bolter)

Next was a presentation from William H Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute. This largely presented data on UK internet use trends. You can read more on their website, but it's worth repeating the odd top-line result here. It's thought-provoking if nothing else. (apologies if I've got any of the stats wrong in attempting to transcribe my shockingly bad handwriting).

• 70% of British population is online.
• The internet profile of a rich, old person is strikingly similar to that of a young, poor person.
• 38% of us have met someone online (I was a bit surprised this was so low).
• The internet is fast becoming the first place we go to for information. In 2005, 38% of people would go to the internet first for medical/ health information. In 2007, this was 68%.
  
• We trust the internet. We trust it as much as broadcast media, and less than newspapers.
  
• Our trust in the internet is increasing whilst our trust in the government is decreasing. At the same time we are more inclined to want the government to regulate the internet (people are inconsistent shocker).
  
• People who use the internet are more sociable than people who do not.
  
• We think we are getting better at searches, but actually the search engines are getting cleverer (which includes cleverer at sending us to brands, though this might be seen as a good thing if the brand is the BMJ or NHS).
• When we find information online, we go via search engines or social media.
  

On that final point, Dutton also noted that we don't go to a "place" anymore, as much as we seek out specific content. We are less likely to hang out at the Guardian, FT, BBC, or Times. Rather, we seek out a story and end up at one of them. This reflects the oft-repeated line that homepages are pretty redundant these days (really, when was the last time you went to the BBC homepage?) and a point made by Deverell; that it is the low-cost of searches which have allowed us all to become media producers in the digital age. This was challenged by the floor though, as it was pointed out that we often google specific places, if only because it's as quick/ quicker than sorting through personal bookmarks. (I can't be the only one who googles themself every time they are asked for their work phone number?). I also asked about how he thought about the "digital divide", and if he had any demographics on who comments and contributes online. If all the "public media" benefits of the digital age are to be found in user-generated content, surely this is, at least, a secondary form of a digital divide? Dutton pointed me to their research papers online for more information, but couldn't provide much detail there and then.

Finally, there was a short presentation from Jude England, Head of Social Science at the British Library. She talked quite broadly about the ways in which the British Library was trying to deal with digital. She painted a picture of the library as an institution still quite stuck to an idea of collecting for future generations (rather than necessarily being used, today). Although they are opening up the collections a lot more now, on the whole, you do still need to visit the building. She made some fascinating points about the issues involved in collecting digital culture. For example, the library asks permission to archive blogs, and so generally will only get 25% of the ones they want (you have to sign a form saying you own the copyright for all the content, you can see bloggers jumping at that). She emphasised how important the collecting of digital culture is: what's going to happen to all those pictures of snow people send the BBC?

In questions, I picked up on a point England had made about digital collections perhaps helping improve the "public understanding of research". I suggested that we were perhaps better served buy concepts such as "public engagement" or "public participation" rather than "public understanding" (I know, cliches and jargon at that, but it's my job to say stuff like that). It's all very well using the internet to explain to the public what researchers do and/ or let a larger number of people have access to primary and secondary sources. However, I think one of the great things about people like the BL archiving blogs is that it shows the importance of blogs alongside more traditional forms of publishing. For example, Literary researchers should be paying attention to the sorts of literary criticism done by lit-bloggers and fan-fiction communities. Academics should let themselves be challenged and informed by publics as much as they should do challenging and informing work themselves. In response England made the good (but ever-so-easy) point that the public need to turn up to such engagement work. Still, I'm not sure ideas of "public understanding" should be structuring our thoughts about "public service media", in an digital age, or at any other time.

12:15. Jude England: How Karl Marx managed to get a readers' pass to the British Library, I don't know (Ha! True! It is a good point).

12:45. Do British Library archives reflect the original long tail? (or at least long tail analysis is v. applicable?)

12:55. William Dutton: People used to send hate email on campus in the late 1970s. It's nothing new.

I then missed a chunk of the event after lunch - bunked off for a meeting about curriculum reform. I did catch a bit of the end of this and the panel discussion, and it sounded like it included some really amazing projects. Much more "grass-rooty", at least in contrast to the big brands of the BBC or BL featured in the morning. Look them up: the projects were Dogs Trust, the School of Everything, and the Social Innovation Camp.

15:15. Dan McQuillan: words like "engagement" and "participation" tend to be used as platitudes (I have a lot of sympathy with this...)

15:20. Fascinating example of some women who set up their own peer-to-peer learning project instead of doing MA's in media/ arts (think they are called MzTek)

After coffee, there was a "reflections" panel. First up was Charles Brown, a lecturer in Media Management at Westminster. He started on a deliberately optimistic note: that we are living in the most exciting phase of public service media, that change is good and we should not fear digital technologies. His presentation was mainly about "OTT technologies". I'm not entirely sure what they are, but sound cool. They are OTT because they work "over the top" of content dissemination platforms, his example was largely Project Canvas (a sort of extension of iplayer, outside of just the BBC, see this blogpost from the BBC for some notes). His discussion seemed to center around how well organisations such as Sky, Virgin, Google or the major museums might be able to work alongside the BBC. I thought this raised some interesting points, but I still wondered where more "grassroots" work would stand. Maybe these issues needed to be brought back to the tensions endemic to the idea of a BBC-tube?

Next up was the always interesting Bill Thompson. He put the whole issue in a historical context, taking us back to the early 1920s and the creation of the BBC, when (as he put it) six radio companies started producing media content in order to sell their boxes of technology off the back of. The upshot of this image being the nicely provocative question: do we think of the BBC as a technology company, or media producer? Which made for an interesting reflection of Deverell's contention that the software engineers are the new creatives and, if nothing else, puts the annual complaints about Christmas adverts for digital radio boxes into some perspective. Enacting the rule that the first person to cite Clay Shirky wins, Bill went on to note that "the printing press made monks [seem] slow". Similarly, he suggested, YouTube has made television dull, the internet in general has made public service broadcasting patronising, unappealing and irrelevant.

Bill also highlighted some of the work done by Channel Four, such as diverting budget from daytime educational programming to amazing youth-oriented projects like Smokescreen. With these examples, he also made the point that there are different types and different styles of public service media in a digital age. I really liked this point, and would like to underline that there this relates to different audiences, at different times, for different purposes too. Something I think is especially important in the context of a Channel Four example, considering the aspect of their public service remit which refers to serving diverse and marginal audiences.

Finally, we heard from Roland Harwood, from NESTA/ 100% Open. He started with the warning that public service media wasn't really his area, but that he could talk about the opening up of large organisations, and the ways in which this relates (positively) to innovation. He started off by joking that the web had killed careers first in music industry, then publishing, and so now he was an advocate for "open innovation". This, broadly, is a desire that industries should share the risks and rewards of innovation, that their default should be "open". Moreover, that increasingly there is no escape from open, that innovation industries must be so. He had some nice examples, Mozilla being a classic one, but also some research done into the 25-39 male demographic by the Discovery Channel, which was shared with other brands. He also referred to work between Great Ormond Street Hospital and McLaren F1 pit-stop crews. Some intensive care staff were joking about the similarity between patient handover and what the pit-stop crews do, and then thought they might be able to learn from them (Sun article, if you're interested). I loved this example, though it did strike me that this was more a matter of listening to the expertise within the hospital as much as reaching out (part of why I liked it).

I wanted to pick up on one of the things Harwood said, that "big didn't necessarily mean bad", and link this to Deverell's point that public service media in a digital age should do less, but better. I also wanted to highlight the fact that we'd been talking about "the public" all day rather than "publics" or "audiences" (Again, cliche, I know. Again: my job). I think this is really significant in terms of the digital age opportunities for public service broadcasting: that there is a greater possibility to serve niche markets (in some respects, this is the long tail argument). So I asked the panel if they thought there was a tension between serving everyone high quality content through Big Broadcasting, or people able to serve lots of people ok with cheaper niche content that appeals to more specific interests. Bill made the very fair point that niche content can serve people a lot better than just "ok", even at a low cost. He also emphasised that there will still be moments where we come together (Obama inauguration, anyone) and, I think more importantly, that facebook serves a lot of people in lots of different ways: we don't necessarily have to put broad- and narrow-casting in opposition to each other.

On Big-Bad, Harwood also drew an interesting comparison in terms of the relative possibilities for openness of media companies vs. "Big Pharma". Lots of people can make their own video and put it up against BBC content on YouTube; it's harder to make your own drugs. I thought this was a salient comparison, although it reflects some complex and very controversial issues (google "open source drugs" or slightly less heavyweight reading, there's this Guardian piece on garage genetics).

16:30. From floor: We wouldn't invent the BBC today. Roland Harwood: We wouldn't invent the NHS (but #welovetheNHS). We wouldn't build St Paul's (something in the architectural metaphor...).

16:45. Example of Chinese restaurants as "open franchise" - because they are all roughly the same, but with no central HQ/ brand.

16:55. David flags up Connection Factory website, especially as a space to ask for help and/ or ideas from other members (e.g. this on studying BBC audiences)

All in all, it was a good day. Thanks to Anna and David for organising it. I don't feel I changed my mind about anything big, or learnt a huge amount of detail. But that isn't necessarily a criticism. I thought through some ideas and I met some interesting people. Both of which are important. It was, on reflection, a little like spending the day stuck inside a really geeky episode of Media Talk, or perhaps a media-themed Digital Planet (n.b. in my opinion, that's a good thing).

A week or so ago I asked my students and the wonderful world of twitter for examples of websites showing some sort of science-themed hoax, or at least a bit of artistic play with credulity and/ or realism in talk about science. I promised I'd compile a short blogpost with some of the best ones, so here it is.

Several people mentioned Dihydrogen Monoxide, a hoax which played with public fear over "chemicals" by using the unfamiliar name for water (see more background on the wikipedia entry). There were sites developed by artists interested in issues of belief and attitudes to new technologies: malepregnancy.com, now slightly dated perhaps, and the rather spooky GenPets. It was especially interesting to see a spoof sites set up as publicity for health information campaigns. For example, the site advertising a downloadable tan (see also Nursing Times article about it). Also, the Sense About Science/ Office for Fair Trading "miracle cure" sites for Fat Melting Pads and an "all-natural" diabetes breakthrough (see also SAS press release).

There is arguably a big difference between these sites and satire done for a more straightforward laugh, although there are also overlaps. A lot of the humour on satirical sites such as the Onion stem from the fact they are a mix of the believable and the unbelievable: they depend on an ability to reproduce and twist the real. Projects like malepregnancy.org or the Sense About Science spoofs are also different from sites which we might happen to simply disagree with, have accidentally got things wrong, haven't bothered to check their sources, or even deliberately aim to deceive in order to, for example, dupe people into buying things. Although, again, if such sites didn't exist, many of the spoof ones wouldn't either. In some respects, the diversity of wikipedia-alikes is illustrative of this. Uncyclopedia, Scholarpedia, CreationWiki, Conservapedia, Wikipedia itself, and Britannica for that matter: all very different entities, and yet also (self-consiously) similar.

To give a little background as to why I was looking for such sites: it was for a class on realism, science and the web. An awful lot of traffic on the web, especially science-themed traffic, is a matter of shifting information around, often shifting it quite far from its material points of origin. What's more, we use visualisations and mashups and embedded media and metaphors to communicate. This can make the information easier to understand, but sometimes decontextualises it too. It can be easy to loose a sense of where, who and how it came about, which in turn can make its validity hard to assess. Arguably, lot of modern life is about (a) symbols (b) trust and (c) shifting quite immaterial information along giant production lines. Social theoriests have been banging on about these issues for years. People seem to get especially worried about it online though, perhaps because there is so much information there, or simply because of fears of the immaterial 'virtuality' of the web. People can get especially worried when it comes to science-themed information too, again perhaps because there is a lot of it, perhaps because it's seen as especially important, or perhaps because of the history of associations between science and truth, openness and honesty (or perhaps all these reasons).

To boil bookloads of social theory into something simple: We do not have time to learn how to build a computer, programme it and do brain surgery. Instead, we do one of these skills (or another entirely), trading our own specialisation for the products of other people’s. In some respects this is very efficient; we get to utilise a lot of very specialist knowledge and skills this way. Many of the key advantages of modern life are built on such a model. However, it does mean we end up spending the bulk of our lives in ignorance. We are all very stupid most of the time. Personally, I think we should accept, even embrace, this. Ask questions: wear our ignorance and curiosity on our sleeves. This means we shouldn't be put off by other people's questioning either and, in accepting ignorance, hold off from too much pointing and laughing when people get something wrong and/ or are quicker to trust than they necessarily should.

If you are interested, but would rather avoid too much pomo theory, I can recommend Howard Rheingold's short essay on online 'crap' detection, and this week's Guardian Science podcast includes some thoughtful chat about trust and incredulity around scientific expertise. If you are really keen on science-themed fake sites, you might like this compendium, and, just to underline that crisis over public trust of the promises of science and technology isn't exactly a new issue, one of my students sensibly added this story of an 18th century chess-playing machine to the mix.