{"id":9941,"date":"2015-03-02T09:47:05","date_gmt":"2015-03-02T14:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9941"},"modified":"2015-03-02T09:47:05","modified_gmt":"2015-03-02T14:47:05","slug":"celebrities-and-attention-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/03\/02\/celebrities-and-attention-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Celebrities and Attention Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I’m running unrelated articles head-on into each other<\/a>, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder’s thoughts on scientific celebrities<\/a> (taking off from Lawrence Krauss’s defense of same) and Megan Garber’s piece on “attention policing”<\/a>, spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet by storm.<\/p>\n

Like Sabine, I’m generally in favor of the idea of science celebrities, though as someone whose books are found on shelves between Lawrence Krauss’s and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s, there’s no small amount of self-interest in that. But I think it’s generally good to direct more public attention to science-y things, by whatever means necessary. Which is why I spent an afternoon a month or so back with a cameraman filming me putting footballs in a freezer.<\/p>\n

I do share the concern, though, about the attention-steering effects of celebrity. Sabine describes this within the context of science as a hypothetical involving Neil deGrasse Tyson publicly mentioning one of her papers. I think that hypothetical is already a reality outside of science, though, with the vagaries of celebrity meaning that the public image of science is largely drawn from a handful of photogenic fields with charismatic proponents at the expense of a much larger range of science with more direct impact on daily life. <\/p>\n

The APS March Meeting<\/a> takes place this week, and will be the largest physics meeting of the year. It probably won’t generate publicity in proportion to its attendance, though, because it’s largely focused on condensed matter physics, and that’s just not as sexy as astrophysics or particle physics. And that can be pretty frustrating for people in March Meeting research fields.<\/p>\n

(This is not entirely the fault of the celebrities themselves– Cosmos did make an effort to include some stuff from other fields of science, and Brian Cox has expanded his tv-presenter empire to include biological topics. the problem, though, is that celebrity isn’t transferrable, and so doing this necessarily means having people who attained fame via work in one field out in the media talking about fields that can be pretty far removed from their areas of expertise. Which can be even more frustrating, particularly when the new topics aren’t handled well.)<\/p>\n

At the same time, though, “you’re insufficiently interested in the stuff I consider important” is the battle cry of the humorless scold, as described in Garber’s piece at the Atlantic<\/a> (same link as above, to save you scrolling back up). Which is why I spend a lot of time on Twitter scrolling past stuff that I think is pointless, biting back snide replies. There’s no accounting for taste, and all that, and you’re not going to get people to stop caring about whatever weird shit they’ve decided to care about by telling them that it’s unimportant trash. All you’re going to do is piss them off.<\/p>\n

So, as irritating as it can be to see celebrity-driven attention going disproportionately to a handful of fields, it’s also important not to get too worked up about that and start yelling at people, because that doesn’t really do any good. (Yes, I’m aware of the irony of saying this in a post where I just finished complaining that people are insufficiently interested in things I consider important. You’re very clever, now shut up.)<\/p>\n

All you can really do is work with the system as much as you can to promote what you like, and when something catches on, run with it as far as you can. Which is why, while I have no interest in reading any of the umpteen pieces on the science of color perception that were rushed out in the wake of the silly dress business, I applaud the scientists who produced them. Ride that horse until it collapses under you, because you might not get another chance.<\/p>\n

So, you know, as with so many other things, there’s a needle to thread here. Celebrity is probably a net positive, but you need to be cautious about its attention-directing effects. At the same time, though, getting too caught up in the misdirection of attention by celebrity communicators is a short fast road to frustration and the writing of crankily contrarian books.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I’m running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder’s thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss’s defense of same) and Megan Garber’s piece on “attention policing”, spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet… Continue reading Celebrities and Attention Police<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,265,7,28,37,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","category-in_the_media","category-physics","category-politics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9941","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=9941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}