5/22/2023 0 Comments Slapdash blog![]() On a typical day, I'm pretty sure the overlap between my blog readership and the readership of the Daily Mail is negligible, but for essentially random reasons, this story ended up being put in front of a lot of people who wouldn't actively seek it out.įrom a communications and policy perspective, the hope is that when these stories land in front of people, they spark a "Hey, that's cool." sort of reaction. My favorite personal example of this is when my Forbes blog post about friction, inspired by a silly episode where I didn't lose my phone off the roof of my car, wound up as a story in the Daily Mail. But there's also a lot of connections that are essentially random. ![]() In the pop-culture analogy, these are basically like Beyoncé performing at the Super Bowl. Most of the time, this involves big, splashy stories- LIGO detecting gravitational waves, or the Pluto fly-by, and that kind of thing. And some fraction of that content will, from time to time, randomly end up impinging on the awareness of people who aren't actively seeking information about science, leaving them with the same kind of stochastic awareness of science news that I have about celebrity culture. That is, we generate a lot of content about science that is primarily consumed by people who already care about the subject, in the same way that legions of reporters generate endless stories and thinkpieces about Beyoncé and other celebrities. And the end result is that even though her music is not my thing, I have a hazy sense of her place in the pop-culture firmament, and a generally positive impression.Īnd hand-wringing blog posts aside, I think science communication could do a lot worse than operating on this same basic model. Which is more or less inevitable, because there are a lot of people out there who care very deeply about the activities of these individuals, and pump an enormous amount of effort into generating stories about them. I think of this general phenomenon as "stochastic awareness of pop culture." I don't have any systematic knowledge of Beyoncé or the various Kardashians, but I know who they are and a bit about them because that information randomly shows up in front of me. Nevertheless, I know of her, and have a generally positive impression, because news about her manages to impinge on my awareness in a variety of indirect ways- performing at the Super Bowl, bits of gossip on the pop-music station I listen to when SteelyKid's in the car (they don't regularly play her stuff, but they talk about her a bunch), or various science-y people on Twitter gushing about her dropping a new album, etc.īeyoncé is just the most positive example of a general category of people I don't have any particular reason to care about who I am nonetheless vaguely informed about. I don't own any of her music, and I'm not sure I've ever listened to a complete song of hers, as occasional snippets have been enough to confirm that it's really not my thing. It's not anything that Beyoncé herself did, just the fact that I'm aware of her. Which is generally a cue for much hand-wringing among the science-communication crowd over how we're failing, and need to Do Better.īut over the last few years, I've started to wonder whether that's really as big a problem as all the deeply concerned blog posts I've read seem to think. Most of the rest of the public isn't looking for information about science, and thus, they're not getting it. The audience for science blogs and web sites and the rest is drawn from the same limited pool of people who actively seek that stuff out. The general thrust of both Borchelt and Jarreau's pieces is pretty similar: a lot of work in "science communication" seems to be misdirected or ineffective. ![]() So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type, and hopefully end up where I need to be, whether or not anyone else pays any attention. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.īut, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for.
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