{"id":2708,"date":"2008-06-27T08:39:33","date_gmt":"2008-06-27T08:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/06\/27\/science-blogs-what-are-they-go\/"},"modified":"2008-06-27T08:39:33","modified_gmt":"2008-06-27T08:39:33","slug":"science-blogs-what-are-they-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/06\/27\/science-blogs-what-are-they-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Blogs: What Are They Good For?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs<\/a>. Brian at Laelaps responds<\/a>, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees<\/a>.<\/p>\n

You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I’m going to be talking about it at a workshop in September<\/a> (first talk, no less…), I better have some opinions..<\/p>\n

The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:<\/p>\n

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My thesis is that it’s not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don’t have the incentive to write the kinds of posts which are necessary. Furthermore, when we think in terms of incentive and motivation, the limitations upon the effects of online science writing become disquietingly clear. The problem, phrased without too much exaggeration, is that science blogs cannot teach science, nor can they change the world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

My flippant response to this is “My thesis is that it’s not yet possible for me to set up a home Ethernet network using a pipe wrench.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Look, I don’t disagree with a thing he says about the incentive structure of science blogging, and blogging in general. He’s absolutely right that the desire for traffic pushes people to write about topics that will bring page views and comments, which all too often makes scienceblogs.com feel like ranting-about-religion-blogs.com. His analysis of the culture and processes of the science blogosphere is spot-on.<\/p>\n

But here’s the thing: we’re not a college science faculty. I mean, some of us are science faculty at colleges and universities, but bloggers as a group are not a faculty. We’re not providing “an interactive, distributed process of continuing education,” because that’s not the point<\/strong> of running a weblog. You won’t find people at Crooked Timber<\/a> or The Valve<\/a> providing an interactive, distributed process of continuing education in the humanities and social sciences, either– that’s not what blogs do.<\/p>\n

The mistake Blake is making is the flip side of the mistake in the most recent Ask a ScienceBlogger<\/a>. The questioner in that case erred by thinking of blogs as a research tool, while Blake is erring in the opposite direction, by thinking of blogs as a teaching tool. In reality, they’re neither primarily about research, nor about teaching.<\/p>\n

Science blogs, and blogs in general, are neither a distributed classroom nor a free-floating research conference. The proper analogy is something closer to the popular book market. Blake makes a brief reference to this, but while he’s right on the details, he again misses the point:<\/p>\n

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[T]hink back to a popularization of science, or a class you took in school, which enthralled you, which fired your imagination. Lots of people have stories about “when I decided to become an astronomer” or “when I fell in love with biology.” Carl Sagan is frequently invoked in these recollections; my first Sagans were, actually, Timothy Ferris in The Creation of the Universe (1984) and David Goodstein of The Mechanical Universe (1985). Now that you have your Sagan in mind, here’s the question: how much of the science involved in that story was discovered in the year the story happened? Within the previous five years? Within the previous fifty?<\/p>\n

To pick a specific example: How much of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) was about material which was speculative at the time, and how much covered territory which had been well and solidly established over the previous decades?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He’s absolutely correct that the great popularizations mostly rely on well-established science, not the fad-of-the moment. But the bigger point that he misses is that you can’t learn science from popularizations<\/strong>. Cosmos<\/cite> is a wonderful book, and the tv program was a transformative event in my life, but it can only inspire people to learn about science, not teach them science.<\/p>\n

The situation in the science blogosphere is pretty much an exact parallel to the situation in the science book-o-sphere, if you’ll excuse the hideous neologism. Go to your local big-box bookstore, and find the science section (this sometimes takes some effort). Ignore the smattering of real college textbooks that always turn up in these places, and what do you see?<\/p>\n

Well, in physics at least, what you’ll find is a fairly random scatter of books about pretty much the same sorts of topics that you see in the blogosphere. There’ll be a bunch of books about the latest hot controversial theory (Smolin, Woit, Susskind, Randall, Greene, etc.), a few books about other recent developments (I just got a review copy of Titan Unveiled<\/cite>, presenting data from the Cassini mission, and you’ll find a few books about quantum computing and so on), some ridiculous crankery and various books debunking ridiculous crankery, and a handful of magisterial tomes providing a grand overview of some (sub)field. The proportions aren’t the same as in the science blogosphere, but the basic range of topics is the same.<\/p>\n

What you won’t<\/strong> find is “an interactive, distributed process of continuing education.” That’s not what popular books do<\/strong>. They’re not written to allow people who already know about science to extend their knowledge into new areas, or to allow people with no science background to bypass college science classes. They’re written to give people with no science background some flavor of the excitement of science, and hopefully inspire a few of them to seek out real education elsewhere.<\/p>\n

The topics you see on the science book shelf are no more representative of the field than the blogs that you find in your RSS reader. High energy physics is grossly over-represented in both Borders and Bloglines, and condensed matter is grossly under-represented. This happens for exactly the same reasons in book publishing as in blogs: people write popular books not as part of a concerted effort to educate the general public about what’s important in physics, but because they feel moved to do so, for more or less the same set of reasons that people feel moved to write blog posts. They write about something that particularly inspires them, or something that pisses them off, or just something that they think a lot of people are likely to read. That means lots of overheated hype about particle physics, and almost nothing about condensed matter, despite the fact that condensed matter physicists vastly outnumber high-energy types, and condensed matter physics has infinitely more practical importance to people’s lives.<\/p>\n

So, yeah, it’s perfectly true that “science blogs cannot teach science,” in the same way that it’s perfectly true that I can’t configure my home network with a pipe wrench. They’re not the right tool for the job that they’re not doing.<\/p>\n

What can<\/strong> science blogs do? Well, they can do the same things that popular science books do– give people with no science background some flavor of the excitement of science, and inspire some of them to become scientists themselves.<\/p>\n

Blogs also offer one advantage over books: they offer a chance to humanize scientists to the general public, and I think this is the area where, contrary to Blake’s thesis, they can<\/strong> change the world, in at least a small way.<\/p>\n

One f the biggest problems we have as a society is that science, particularly the more mathematical sciences, is seen as the exclusive province of nerds and geeks– people who are somehow set apart from the rest of humanity. This makes it seem OK for Joe Sixpack to not understand science, or think about it much– science is something done by people who are Different, and normal folks don’t need to worry about it.<\/p>\n

Blogs offer a small opportunity to get past this, at least for the segment of people who read blogs, precisely through the ephemeral posts that form Blake’s Category 0– ” Fun posts about random non-science stuff.” YouTube videos, cute kid stories, vacation pictures, whatever– these all make it clear that Scientists Are People, Too, and I think it’s hard to overstate the importance of this stuff. Blake dismisses it very casually, but I think this is one of the critical purposes that blogs can serve, and one of the areas where they’re really different than books. There aren’t a lot of books out there that present both the wonder of science and the humanity of scientists, mostly because it’s really hard to do either well, let alone both at once.<\/p>\n

I’m not saying that those of us who have blogs should stop trying to teach science through our posts. If anything, I share Blake’s desire to see more<\/strong> basic-level blogging about science (I’d also like to see more popular books about science, enough so that I’m hip-deep in re-writing one…). But we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that this will provide a means of really teaching science<\/strong>, as opposed to inspiring people to want to learn science<\/strong>. The blogosphere is a shelf full of popular books, not a virtual college, and I don’t think we need to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees. You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I’m going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no… Continue reading Science Blogs: What Are They Good For?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,18,13,7,51,37,11,52,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-books","category-education","category-physics","category-physics_books","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-science_books","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}