Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a “Social Media” section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop.<\/p>\n
I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly became clear that there was only one other person at the meeting using it. I happen to know him, so when I ran into him later at the poster session, I commented on how we were the only people at the meeting using the official Twitter hashtag. Someone else nearby looked baffled, and we had to explain. Not just what a hashtag was, but what Twitter was.<\/p>\n
I was reminded of this by the 20-year anniversary of the physics arxiv, commemorated recently by an article in Nature<\/cite><\/a> by Paul Ginsparg (posted a week ago, but only just removed from behind the paywall), and, appropriately, the posting to the arxiv of an older article<\/a>. Physicists, as we never tire of telling anyone foolish enough to make eye contact, pioneered a lot of electronic media, including both the arxiv and the Web itself.<\/p>\n But, as my experience with the DAMOP hashtag makes clear, while social media have arrived, they’re not evenly distributed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Physicists took to the arxiv very quickly, and remain its primary users, though math and computer science have also embraced the idea. As Ginsparg notes in Nature<\/cite>, though, numerous attempts to make an arxiv-equivalent in the life sciences have failed. Biologists and chemists stubbornly resist the sharing of preprints, even in an arxiv-like format that could clearly be used to establish priority (as is the case in physics).<\/p>\n But it’s not like physicists are great social-media users. The number of physicists using blogs hasn’t really changed that much in the last five or so years. A few new people have started, but some old blogs have gone dark. This, despite a rapid growth in the number of science-related blogs overall.<\/p>\n And mathematicians are way better than physicists at using blogs. Terry Tao’s blog<\/a> is famously a hot place to do mathematics, and there are numerous other mathematicians using blogs as a research platform, working at a very high level. This idea hasn’t really taken off in any other discipline, though.<\/p>\n And, of course, there’s Twitter, circling back to the story beginning this post. I jumped on the DAMOP hashtag idea because the last conference I had been to before that was the AAAS meeting, where there was a ton of live-tweeting of talks and other interesting exchange going on via Twitter. Twitter is huge among life scientists and science writers– when there’s a big biology meeting, I have to think about unfollowing people so I don’t get completely swamped. But physicists? A surprisingly large number of physicists still have no real idea what Twitter even is.<\/p>\n Is there a clear and obvious lesson to draw from the uneven distribution of social media use among scientific disciplines? Beats me. I don’t really see one, but I haven’t given it all that much thought. If you think of one, though, leave it in a comment, or send it to me on Twitter…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in June, when I was headed to DAMOP, I got email telling me that they had an official Android app. I installed it, and in with the meeting program and maps and things was a “Social Media” section, that included an official hashtag: #apsdamop. I posted a few things using it, but it rapidly… Continue reading Social Media Are Not Evenly Distributed<\/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":[8,7,11,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-science","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5828","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=5828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}