Recently, the NY Times had an article discussing the concept of “ambient awareness”, or as the article puts it, “incessant online contact”. Now, first off, I have to admit that I’m one of the over-30-year-olds the article mentions, who finds the concept of subjecting others to (and being subjected to) a stream of trivial details about one’s day completely unappealing. The proponents of Twitter and FriendFeed and the like feel that they’re getting a more intimate understanding of people, “something raw about my friends,” as one user puts it. I’m more in line with the critics quoted in the article that the end result is more “parasocial” than social, and that it ends up an extension of reading gossip magazines and following celebrities from afar.
So how do these new practices apply to the world of science research?
—article continues—
The Times article reminded me of this study, which notes that much of the activity spent online is not really about social interactions, it’s instead focused on creating a digital identity, a representation of how you want the world to see you, literally a way to “write ourselves into being.” There’s something important in there for the science community, creating an online identity is of growing importance, whether you do it through your lab’s web page, your set of tagged articles on Digg, your blog about your research or personal interests or your photos on Flickr. When people are interested in asking you to give a talk, hiring you, joining your lab, or collaborating with you, they’re going to look you up via Google, and as the Times article points out, there’s a danger in not participating, and thus not controlling your online image:
“This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.”
So while I do think creating a digital identity is important, the question then becomes, should we all be constantly tweeting our daily activities (“Did 20 minipreps. Had a cup of coffee.”)? As I’ve frequently written in the past, to me it’s a question of time management and personality type. There does seem to be a growing group of biologists on Friendfeed (many are the usual bloggers and web 2.0 evangelists one seems to see everywhere). Lurking around the site, there are occasionally helpful, if shallow, discussions of methods and daily laboratory activities, but the majority of it seems to be chatting about the news, web 2.0, life as a scientist, etc. If you’re of a personality type that enjoys this sort of chatting (and yes, I am one), I can see how joining an online community like this could be fun. I’m not convinced that it’s the best tool for getting your specific question answered in an accurate and immediate manner. It seems more about social interaction than it is a practical resource for the work parts of your life.
Serendipity may allow you to stumble across new avenues of research and new colleagues, but when you need to know exactly what concentration of KCl to use in your buffer, you can’t just wait around hoping someone will come along with the answer. You’re always going to need to strike a balance between the random drift of crowdsurfing and directed inquiries and communications with trusted sources and collaborators. I also worry about the time commitment that so many seem to put into such efforts. I can’t even begin to ponder devoting time to reading the minutiae of a few hundred graduate students’ lives, let alone writing up my own. But that’s me, I’m old and stodgy.
There’s also this cautionary tale about living your scientific life in the open. Here, scientists discussed preliminary data at meetings and audience members took photos of the talk slides and referred to that data in papers before the data was published (a good discussion of the ethics involved can be found here). It’s unclear if the originator of the data will be able to publish it, now that it’s already out elsewhere. And while many will argue that information should be set free, in the practical world of building a career and sustaining a lab, losing the opportunity to exploit your own hard work is a big setback. Ethically, I suppose what matters in this case is the policy established for that particular meeting. Most meetings have specific sets of rules regarding republication of material presented, and as a speaker, you should always know the policy before putting together your talk (“caveat orator” as it were). Most conferences want to encourage the discussion of unpublished data (it’s always more interesting to hear about than older results that you’ve already seen). As an example, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has the following notice given to meeting attendees:
These abstracts should not be cited in bibliographies. Material contained herein should be treated as personal communications and should be cited as such only with the consent of the author.
Please note that recording of oral sessions by audio, video or still photography is strictly prohibited except with the advance permission of the author(s), the organizers and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
So theoretically, at least, you have some measure of protection in place when discussing unpublished results at such a meeting (assuming your colleagues are ethical or at least unwilling to face the wrath of the community). In the wild west of the internet, you have no such safety net, and your blog postings, tweets and whatever technology comes along in the next five minutes are fair game. And no, having a time stamp on a blog entry will not protect you or your career if someone else sees your data and figures out what it means before you do. Credit is given to the person who makes the intellectual leap, not necessarily the person who collected the data that enabled that leap.
September 21, 2008 at 10:56 am
But if you build the right network on Twitter, it will tell you what concentration of KCl to use, and might even suggest cation alternatives to consider. This is precisely my experience of Twitter – you need to look beyond “Had a cup of cofee” and realize that this “presence” is the social glue that is essential to hold a functional network together.
At present, it’s difficult to build such a network because scientists have not embraced these technologies in numbers. That’s what our Small World project at the University of Leicester (http://scienceoftheinvisible.blogspot.com/search/label/SmallWorlds) is seeking to change, by facilitating the early stages of network formation.
September 21, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Hi AJ, thanks for the comment. Are scientists really behind the curve here? What other professions have embraced these sorts of networking tools and made them into standard practice for the mainstream? Are there models we can use that are relevant? Sermo seems to have caught on with the MD’s, are there any other similar stories for say, investment bankers or chefs or whatevers?
I also worry about, as you call it, the “social glue”. I don’t think most people are going to be willing to commit to creating a constant stream of that glue, nor reading one from others. Is that necessary to create a functioning, useful network? If I want to use the power of social networking to get the occasional technical question answered, does that mean I must devote large portions of my time maintaining my relationships in that network? It seems like a lot to ask for information I could probably just find on my own with a minimal effort.
edited to add: Sermo claims to have around 65,000 registered MD’s on the site, with around 1,500 active during any given week. The Department of Labor says there were 633,000 MD’s in the USA in 2006, so if only 10% of a profession is registered, and only 0.2% are active at a time, can this activity be called “mainstream” for that profession?
September 21, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Yes, scientists are behind the curve as far as social media are concerned. I talk to people from different disciplines and biologists stand out in this respect (chemists and physicists are less paranoid about sharing online). This seems to be mostly due to not wanting to be “scooped” and a culture of “tight lips save ships”.
Do you need devote large portions of time to maintaining relationships in a network? It depends what you mean by large. Probably no more than the time you spend maintaining relationships with your immediate colleagues or the institution you work for, but yes, it takes time. There are no free lunches. The alternatives, intellectual isolation and falling further and further behind the curve, are worse.
And then eventually, you reap the benefits – a filtered online brains trust sharper and more focussed than any wiki, Google or PubMed search. In communities with mutual trust, your network will tell you what to look for before you even know you need it, a kind of hive mind AI.
September 22, 2008 at 8:11 am
I guess the question I’m asking is, who are you comparing scientists to when you say they’re “behind the curve”? Specifically, what professional cultures are ahead of us? What activities are they doing that would be relevant to the scientific community, and how did they build participation where we have failed?
We’ll have to see if that time commitment is warranted. Right now, it’s clearly not, given the paucity of participation in these networks by biologists. Which is always the problem with starting up these networks–they’re not worth using until lots of other people have joined and are heavily contributing. Given the tightness of time and funding, it’s a big hurdle to overcome and very few scientists that I know feel like they’re isolated or behind the curve.
Your comment on “trusted networks” got me thinking though–maybe all of this big open network, meet strangers and collaborators kind of thing is a dead end, and instead we should be thinking more along the lines of what Attila Csordas suggested here, smaller, private networks based at the level of a lab, or a department, rather than a big free-for-all. Keeping up with your own labmates is often a difficult task, and you’ve got much more of a vested interest there.
September 23, 2008 at 3:18 pm
[…] tanakawho Digital intimacy: [Via Bench Marks] Recently, the NY Times had an article discussing the concept of “ambient […]
September 23, 2008 at 3:20 pm
[…] September 23, 2008 — Richard by tanakawho [Crossposted on SpreadingScience] Digital intimacy: [Via Bench Marks] Recently, the NY Times had an article discussing the concept of “ambient […]
September 23, 2008 at 3:24 pm
David,
As always a great discussion. I do not think that all researchers will be twittering or posting their lives on FriendFeed But I will bet that any effecient, successful lab will have someone who is monitoring what is going on in selected areas on these sites.
Of course, the areas will have to be carefully selected 🙂 But, these types of tools are just too good at dispersing information to be ignored. I figure they will supplement email, voicemail, seminars, conferences and publications for the dissemination of scientific information and knowledge.
September 24, 2008 at 1:58 am
I enjoyed reading this post and think you make excellent points. In general I agree that scientists in the main are not using social web tools, with some notable exceptions (discipline based groups such as bioinformaticians, and individual “early adopters”). Most scientists have never heard of RSS and only vaguely about blogs. Microblogs, definitely not.
You’ve touched on some costs and benefits, and there are others of course: educational ones for example. (Teaching). For a journal like Nature, a web social network is very efficient for advising people about how to publish or write a paper – interactive from the point of view that anyone can ask a question, and efficient compared with email because all can see the answers.
Private social networks are certainly one way scientists can use the web. To name but one example, many papers now are written by people in three or more countries: a private web network is useful for online collaborations and developing papers. At NPG we offer such private networks at Nature Network and Connotea, but I am not sure of the uptake – definitely some groups (labs and so on) are using them.
September 24, 2008 at 2:03 am
By the way, I went to an online meeting a year ago which was full of business people. Apparently blue-chip companies are using internal social networks (wikis) as intranets to share client and other portfolio information. I get the impression that financial businesses are using these web tools more nowadays, but this is just an impression. My own feeling is that scientists (or anyone) will only use these tools en masse “if they provide a demonstrable benefit to them” (eg version control of emailing attached drafts of papers back and forth between multi coauthors – eventually everyone will realise that a wiki is better for that!). But everyone is busy and most people won’t get involved in these innovations until they see someone else using it do to something they want to do, or already do but better.
September 24, 2008 at 3:59 am
One of the usual bloggers and Web2 evangelists here 🙂
I wanted to pick up on your comment about Friendfeed and protocols:
“There does seem to be a growing group of biologists on Friendfeed (many are the usual bloggers and web 2.0 evangelists one seems to see everywhere). Lurking around the site, there are occasionally helpful, if shallow, discussions of methods and daily laboratory activities, but the majority of it”
I think this is because you are expecting that community to be providing the wrong thing. Ask a question about exactly how to implement some sort of software tool for bioinformatics and you will get very rapid detailed and helpful responses.
On real lab protocols you get very little because you have a relatively small group of diverse scientists – who have relatively little, methodogically speaking, in common. The community isn’t big enough and concentrated enough to provide answers.
So what this means is that you do have to spend effort to both find and build the ‘trusted network’ that is relevant to your needs. For the question ‘how much KCl do I need’ that network probably isn’t available at Friendfeed. For ‘does the latest Calais offering provide an advantage for my bioinformatics analysis pipeline’ or ‘where is the latest discussion on the OA citation advantage (or lack thereof) happening’ it certainly is.
A lot of it _is_ the equivalent of dropping into people’s offices or sharing a cup of coffee. The investments you make in maintaining your trusted network within your physical environment. So yes, a lot of noise perhaps and something that you need to balance. But at least here I can turn off someone if they aren’t contributing to what I need – try keeping that pesky cow-orker out of your office with their latest hare-brained scheme.
September 24, 2008 at 8:50 am
Thanks to all for your comments. I think what’s really emerged from this, at least in my mind, is an emphasis on smaller, trusted networks, rather than the usual completely open free-for-all one sees in most of the ventures offered online. As Maxine points out, businesses are not interacting with competing businesses through social networks, but instead use them internally, to keep everyone on the same page. In my mind, there’s more traction for an internal network within a lab or a department than there is one that’s open to everyone. In general, you only get to present your work to the lab every now and again at lab meeting, and even more rarely to your department. I think concentrating on those levels is likely to be more effective than “meet friends and collaborators from around the world.”
September 25, 2008 at 2:00 am
Hi
Got here via Nature Networks – and just wanted to add that while I agree that smaller, trusted networks are vital for fast/effective sharing of information and knowledge, there is also a place for more ‘open’ netwrks – that let ‘lurkers’ like myself, get ‘under the skin’ of what’s going on. Important that there is some linkage between them, to allow ideas to flow and influence the wider scientific world.
September 25, 2008 at 6:31 am
[…] Bench Marks » Blog Archive » Digital intimacy ""There’s something important in there for the science community, creating an online identity is of growing importance, whether you do it through your lab’s web page, your set of tagged articles on Digg, your blog about your research or personal interests or your photos on Flickr. When people are interested in asking you to give a talk, hiring you, joining your lab, or collaborating with you, they’re going to look you up via Google, and as the Times article points out, there’s a danger in not participating, and thus not controlling your online image" (tags: onlineidentity scientists) […]
September 25, 2008 at 8:23 am
Liz, I think you’re absolutely right–I use the science blogosphere myself to keep an ear to the ground. But I I don’t think we can expect a huge amount of participation in those big networks from the majority of scientists beyond lurking. I’m arguing that scientists are not behind the curve here, more that they don’t have the time or motivation to blog or tweet on that level. Like the general population, you’re always going to get a subgroup of folks who enjoy that sort of thing and do it, while the majority don’t bother. It always comes back to Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule. I read a variety of non-science blogs, but I don’t expect the rest of the non-science world to suddenly start blogging or even leaving comments on blogs. As such, I think the open networks should currently be viewed somewhat skeptically–do they represent the mainstream of science? Or are they instead skewed toward certain personality types, or people with their own agendas (such as personal promotion and/or promotion of a cause) and those with a fondness for new technologies. I’m more interested in tools that reach beyond this subgroup.
January 3, 2010 at 4:48 am
[…] thought sparked off by a comment from Maxine Clarke at Nature Networks where she posted a link to a post by David Crotty. The thing that got me thinking was Maxine’ statement: I would add that in my […]