science writing

Last week's issue of Science included a perspective piece by my UW colleagues Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele, from Life Science Communication [1]. They focus on the impact of technology and internet communication on the public understanding of science.

People find information online today very differently from the way people used to find information, whether from the traditional printed press or in libraries. Information in broad, authoritative works such as encyclopedias, textbooks or indexes involved highly selective editing by humans, moderated by expert opinion. A reader looking in any printed encyclopedia would be likely to see the same basic facts and be directed to the same essential references.

Now, computer algorithms do much of this job by tracking what people choose to look at after they have searched for a topic or keyword. This changes the process of information discovery, and as Brossard and Scheufele discuss, may introduce feedbacks into the process with unpredictable effects:

[T]here are often clear discrepancies between what people search for online, which specific areas are suggested to them by search engines, and what people ultimately find. As a result, someone's initial question about a scientific topic, the search results offered by a search engine, and the algorithms that a search provider uses to tailor retrieved content to a search may all be linked in a self-reinforcing informational spiral in which search queries and the resulting Web traffic drive algorithms and vice versa (7). This raises an interesting paradox when it comes to relatively new scientific topics, such as nanotechnology, that are still unfamiliar to many people: Is the World Wide Web opening up a new world of easily accessible scientific information to lay audiences with just a few clicks? Or are we moving toward an online science communication environment in which knowledge gain and opinion formation are increasingly shaped by how search engines present results, direct traffic, and ultimately narrow our informational choices?

I encounter this problem here with my weblog. It is very difficult to design an effective presentation strategy for topic-specific searches on a website. It is also hard to maintain internal search capacity on a site the size of this one, with content that comprises both original text and bibliographic references. As you can tell by the fact that I frequently deactivate internal searching altogether, this has been a pain for me to develop and maintain.

The more newsworthy part of this essay is a reference to the effects of online comments after articles about science and technology topics. Brossard and Scheufele refer to a recent conference that covered this topic, and the results of a study in which subjects were exposed to the same story but with different types of comment sections:

Disturbingly, readers' interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story. Exposure to uncivil comments (which included name calling and other non–content-specific expressions of incivility) polarized the views among proponents and opponents of the technology with respect to its potential risks. In other words, just the tone of the comments following balanced science stories in Web 2.0 environments can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.

Anyone who reads comments sections following news articles surely will have noticed the rotten wealth of trolls and other idiots who inhabit such forums. I thought about Brossard and Scheufele's piece again today when I read a post by Dan Conover at Xark: "Why I shut down comments". The post reflects on how blog communities have changed since the early days of blogging in 2005. This timeframe has coincided with the growth of social media of other types, such as Facebook and Twitter, which have given many people a closed community for sharing comments and perspectives with like-minded folks. Conover observes that the trolls and spam are more persistent, causing a rapid degradation of the value of comment sections of many blogs.

This isn't of course universal. Many blogs continue to have rich and varied comment sections with their posts, and some (like mine) never had any comments at all. What I find more interesting is this passage:

I believed then, as I believe now, that the ability to comment and share across horizontal, informal networks is the killer app for the 21st century.

Which sounds nice.

Unfortunately, newspaper and other traditional-media websites, for all their hand-wringing concerns about libel and civility circa 2005, are typically the worst offenders when it comes to building quality comment cultures. We've taught users bad habits and turned comment sections into troll ghettos.

Comments on professional news websites are almost always useless, misguided, or malevolent. Combine this with Brossard and Scheufele's claim that the tone of comment sections affects readers' comprehension of science and technology stories, and I propose a hypothesis: Professional news websites may be the worst way to communicate science, because their comment policies undercut science comprehension.

References

Reading items on my desktop, I found a rant I had written a while back. I generally don't post rants, but a decent amount of time has passed...

I'm totally irritated this morning because we turned on a cable channel where they were showing a documentary about Neandertals from only a few years ago. It's a clutch of talking heads telling stories about what Neandertal life "must have been like", accompanied by actors dressed in skins and clay brow ridges. The difference between the "modern" and "Neandertal" actors is whether the skins have been stripped of fur. If you've seen any human evolution documentaries in the last decade, you know the genre.

Walking caveman shows are hardly anything new, and I've been in a few that have been pretty good. So why am I particularly irritated?

This particular program was such a waste. The producers assembled a fair group of scientists to comment on the Neandertals and clearly spent a lot of money on the production. But then they encouraged those scientists to go way beyond the science. And the scientists went along for the ride.

Here's a hint: When you're talking about the differences between Neandertal and modern human spiritual beliefs, you've gone beyond the science.

Earlier this week, I saw a link on Twitter from a chemist sick of spending time on interviews with journalists: "Another interview makes the cutting room floor".

Yes I wanted to be interviewed because its been drummed into me over 20 years that the public understanding of science is pathetic and we scientists have to do a better job communicating to the masses etc.. Now if you filter the scientists through journalists does that make us better communicators? I think in the pre blog days that was the only way to go but some scientists are cracking communicators and have huge audiences. Not me. My work has a couple of journals and magazines that would likely cover something I might do. The potential for my work to reach a broader audience by contributing to an interview is the “bait”. We scientists are lured hook, line and sinker every time. Bigger audience, equals more citations, more citations equals success, funding and respect. I should go further and say that we try to highlight the work because our collaborators and co-authors also benefit from the exposure.

His complaint is related to tuberculosis research, not bad caveman outfits. But I thought about his concerns when I was watching the program this morning. So many scientists want to help tell good stories about their research, hoping it will make some difference -- a difference to their profile, a difference to public understanding, a difference to their status in the field. It's a mix of selfish and altruistic motivations, a complicated mix.

We can't tell stories alone. But we need to tell our stories, not the stories that writers feed to us.