Possibilities for Democratizing Science Through New Media

Social media or “new media” is revolutionizing the way by which knowledge – both ‘scientific’ and ‘lay’ – is communicated. Indeed, social media represents a powerful set of constantly evolving tools for engaging society in scientific discourse. These tools have two main strengths that are relevant to scientific communication. This blog post is based on a poster presented at the 2010 PrioNet conference in Ottawa Ontario. Click here to download it or read on.

1. Accessibility: Growing Knowledge Networks

Social media is highly accessible to and intuitive for a wide diversity of audiences. Researchers can engage in ‘posting’, ‘tagging’, ‘linking’, ‘feeding’, ‘pinging’, ‘following’ and ‘tweeting’ to spawn new knowledge networks and consequently to amplify the reach and relevance of their research.

2. Interactivity: Opening Space For Science Dialogue

Social media tools are generally characterized by ‘interactivity’, allowing researchers to shift from the unidirectional “one to many” communication approach towards a “many to many” interactive approach.  This dialogue can be facilitated through ‘commenting’, ‘forums’ and ‘linking’ to engender interactive and iterative communication that further shapes ideas/outcomes and empowers audiences.

No Discussion Yet: Creating a space that allows for interactivity is insufficient to actually engender interaction. This screenshot from our blog farmtoforkresearch.com is illustrative. Despite the ability to leave comments, it is rare for academic social media forums to actually stimulate a truly interactive exchange – ironically, there is little or no discussion – yet. We suggest that academics move beyond the passive creation of interactive space towards actively participating in interactive knowledge communities (see Table 1 for suggestions).  Moreover, the potential of new media is largely limited to those whom have high-speed internet access. Marginalized populations (the poor, elderly, remote, etc.) are thus largely excluded from new media forums, although they are often more vulnerable to the risks associated with scientific ‘progress’ than the priveleged populations who have high levels of access to new communications technologies.

Democratizing Science? Rather than viewing readers as passive knowledge receptors, readers are engaged as active participants in shaping knowledge. Scientific communication is thus viewed as a multi-way co-construction of knowledge. Recipients of knowledge are not merely vessels to be filled with scientific data but rather receive, interpret, critically evaluate, and re-communicate information to inform scientific discourse and practice. The dialogic interface provided by the evolving slate of social media tools may open up new possibilities for the democratization of (often opaque) social and natural science discourse. Despite this democratic potential, the use of this media tools is still rare in academia where communication remains dominated by traditional media such as monographs, theses and peer-reviewed journals. Social media will not replace traditional media anytime soon but offers new opportunities to build on and improve scientific communication

Note: I will write a blog post in the near future about ‘perpetuating inequality through new media’

Please leave comments below to make use of my interactive space!