A couple of things have happened over the last few days that have gotten me thinking about the science blogosphere (and the commentosphere too) and the quality of the discourse that happens there.
First off, in case you missed it, quite a kerfuffle (small understatement) erupted online in response to Nature’s news article last week about PLoS’s financial situation (that it isn’t breaking even and is using revenues from PLoS ONE to fund its other flagship journals).
Reading through some of the comments and blog posts about the article reminded me of a real-live discussion I sat in on at Scibarcamp back in March in Toronto. One senior, high-profile physicist at the event said how disillusioned he was with the science blogosphere. He said he’s been really turned off by the nastiness and divisiveness he’s seen. He said the science blogosphere has not fulfilled its promise of being a forum for serious scientific discussion. (Not to say that all blog posts and comments about the Nature article were mud-slinging; I saw some very good discussions. And not to say that all science bloggers engage in ranting. I’ve seen plenty of blogs that do engage in high-quality conversations but I’m sure many bloggers have stories to tell about the nastiness they’ve read or experienced online.)
Now, maybe it’s a generational thing. Those of us who didn’t ‘grow up’ with blogs might be more easily taken aback by what goes on in them. Those of us who did grow up with them perhaps have learned to take the bad with the good.
But still, I wonder how many other scientists out there would agree with this physicist? If there is a critical number of them out there agreeing with him, what does this mean for science blogging?
Then (on to the second thing), I saw this conversation on FriendFeed among researchers who did, shall we say, ‘grow up with the Internet.’ Even they were criticizing the quality of some of the comments on the blogs on Nature Network, saying that they are off-topic, silly, and “tiresome.”
The person whose blog was singled out for criticism was Jenny Rohn and she responded by saying that along with the not-so-serious comments on her blog came some constructive ones too. “I guess I never forget the “social” in social networking, and I don’t feel one has to be Serious and Earnest all the time,” she wrote.
So what do people feel is the right level of bantering/joking/silliness/criticism/insults/nastiness in the science blogo/commentosphere? Is there even a “right” level? Should there be? If there is a right level, are we at it now? If not, how can we get there? I have some opinions on this but I want to hear what other people have to say.
I hope we get to talk about this at our science blogging conference next month in London.
Humm… I think I know that senior, high-profile physicist and I can completely relate to his opinion. I don’t think this is a generational thing. That’s got something to do with politeness and good manners. What I have seen and read in the blogosphere is an amount of nastiness that has in many cases been completely intolerable – but has been tolerated or even fostered by blog authors, to an amount that I find completely disgusting (but nastiness attracts visitors, just try it). Anonymous comments make this game considerably worse. This sort of social networking doesn’t work unless one does something actively to protect the atmosphere. Nastiness and insults give a bad reputation to the whole blogosphere which then turns off other scientists to engage in such discussions. (The atmosphere here at Nature Networks btw is excellent, at least so far.)
There are other reasons why I don’t think blogs are such a good forum for scientific discussions. The most obvious one is that a blog is usually hosted by a single person who can edit the own post as well as edit and/or delete comments and potentially make things look very much to his own favor. Also, blogs typically attract a crowd of readers that share the authors opinions in many regards and then will back him up if somebody disagrees with him. It is just a setup that does not guarantee neutrality, does not really encourage people to offer criticism, and therefore I think is not a really useful environment for unbiased scientific argumentation.
I think you are spot-on in this post, Corie. I have had a look at that Friend feed discussion of Jenny’s blog post you mention, and find it a typical discussion among this particular group of very internet-confident scientists, who take the line that they are “right” and “know” everything, and that everyone else is somehow less informed than they. And if a technical system is in any way limited, well, watch out! That’s a crime!
Anna posted about an experience after writing a blog post for Wired. That was quite horrible.
It is a pity when the “herd mentality” on these groups like FriendFeed and blog discussions (“chiming in” effect) etc encourage people to be rude, and to impugn the motivation of whoever dares to write anything that they happen to disagree with. It’s the same pattern you see all over the internet. Probably these people are quite civilised in person (one hopes!) but the Internet gives them false confidence, as they don’t have to face the people they are being rude about.
Whatever the technical limitations of Nature Network, I find it is a very pleasant place to be, and other users presumably find it similar. Let those who wish to fulminate away among themselves: I find Jenny Rohn much more interesting and enjoyable to read than aggressive rants, and I am sure others do too.
I thought that comment was pretty funny and got a good laugh out of it. Tiresome? Yet he feels compelled to read it and comment on it? If the most tiresome thing that happened in that commenter’s day was that he was forced to read such a tiresome thread, then all I can say is that I am shocked, shocked that NN didn’t protect him from such a tiresome thread.
This reminds me of a certain cartoon.
I think the point of scienceblogs is that the sniping and backbiting that has always gone on behind people’s backs is more out in the open. Scientists haven’t changed in the past few years. But now there are more opportunities for interactions that are not controlled by any gatekeepers. People who used to be gatekeepers don’t like that.
I see there are two sides to the nastiness. Yes, it is unpleasant. But letting those who would be nasty “win” by virtue of their nastiness is fundamentally wrong and to me, much worse than putting up with nastiness.
Sabine, you are correct, there are things about scienceblogs that don’t foster open and neutral debate. But those same things apply to every other medium of communication. Any ability to edit can be used to censor. Many blogs do censor comments and delete ones they don’t like. Some don’t, and it becomes pretty obvious which ones do, and why. I follow the autism debate a lot, and the Huffington Post severely limits what can be posted. Why? Because they are anti-vax and don’t want to allow their readers access to real information. Virtually all of the pro-vaccine blogs don’t censor the anti-vaccine nonsense, they allow it and then comment on it.
I think it is better to allow nonsense and even nastiness to be seen. The only way we can tell if an idea is any good or not is by thinking about it. You have to see and think about a lot of bad ideas to be able to tell that they are bad. We do scientists and even non-scientists no favors by protecting them from nonsense and nastiness. If they cannot tell what is nonsense and what is nastiness for themselves, then the struggle to have a scientifically literate population that can tell right from wrong is lost.
I’m definitely looking forward to discussing some of these issues at the conference next month.
When you get right down to it, I’m not sure that there is a right answer (or at least a single consistent one) to your questions. In many cases, I think that the context and history of the argument are going to be important factors to consider.
Corie, I like your post. And, just like Maxine, I find Nature Network a very pleasant place to be. One small reason is that there are no anonymous posts. But we still have to improve our commenting skills. One problem was pointed out by Sabine, blogs usually attract readers that have similar opinions. And it is tempting to write provocative blog posts to attract comments. I remember a recent discussion about the “art of commenting” on another science blog, but I don’t find the link right now.
I thought it was a bit rich, too – as David says, tiresome? Who’s forcing him?
And to single out Jenny’s post? When, frankly, there are much sillier blogs on NN (*cough*)? One of the most serious and funny and informative and entertaining reads — even without the help of labrador pictures.
(Sorry, the jetlag recedes and I’ve realize how narked I am). Sheesh. I think I’m going to go and and -
and write a blog post. There. That’ll show him.
Just to point out, writing provocative blog posts to attract comments is the antithesis of writing for a crowd of readers who share the writer’s opinions.
Yes, it is unpleasant. But letting those who would be nasty “win” by virtue of their nastiness is fundamentally wrong and to me, much worse than putting up with nastiness.
So, wotcher gonna do, punk? I say nuke the f**kers.
I don’ think blogs are old enough for anyone to have grown up with them. My suggestion would be the opposite, that we are still learning how to use blogs/social networks and that is why, for example, we are having this discussion right now. Identity, visibility and potential consequences are very different from “real life” and also different from slower style of formal letter articles in newspapers or editorials for example.
One easy thing to do is try hard not to reply, either email or blog posts or comment when we are too emotional about the subject. I either don’t reply at all or I try to wait before writing. Typically this is easier said than done :)
The ‘heard mentality’ that happens online is by itself a very interesting topic. This reminds me of a talk by Clay Shirky about the consequences of online facilitation of formation of groups. He gives several examples, some positive, some negative, of the consequences of this ease of formation groups online.
Regarding Maxine’s comment about the group of scientists in FriendFeed I can only say that from my perspective most of the discussions I have been part of there have been very interesting and useful for me.
One of the most annoying things a blogger can experience is to be told what to say … how to blog, how to not blog. Just thought I’d mention that.
As a person who contributes his share of snark and vitriol I do wish the blogosphere was a kinder gentler place.
I would also like to point out that the link you have to the Nature article above seems to be broken.
Oh, no, wait, it’s not broken. Its just only accessible to the special people…. (Oh, the irony hurts!)
But yes, you are making good points and asking good questions.
A lot depends on one’s prior experiences. If one comes to science blogging out of academia with its highly formalized and ritualized kabuki dance of language-use, extremely polite on the surface, yet often very vicious in the subtext, then one sees blogs as very uncourteous and unpleasant – the things that are supposed to be hidden between the lines and now said openly.
Many of the most popular science bloggers have a different history – many years of battling Creationist and other pseudoscience crusaders on Usenet groups in the early 1990s, people who, if they can use language at all, use it in a very vicious way, sometimes with threats of bodily harm. I spent the early 90s on Balkans usenet groups, battling heatedly nationalist Serbs, Croats and Bosnians who do not just voice empty threats but would, if they could find you, really kill you. Others cut their teeth on political blogs or feminist blogs, which are very blunt and heated. Just try not supporting Howard Dean in the 04 primaries or Obama in 08 – you get your fill of human nastiness. And that is nothing compared to what Republicans say once the general election starts!
My first blog was political – I wrote highly opinionated and strongly-worded posts. And of course, I got, let’s put it diplomatically, some highly opinionated commenters. I never deleted. Sometimes I responded (politely at first – that is unusual and disarming – I turned some trolls into friendly and polite commenters that way), sometimes I ignored, sometimes my other commenters took care of trolls.
Then, after the move to Sb, I gradually reduced writing about politics and religion and my threads are now quite nice and polite most of the times. Various heated debates about “framing” or the latest “Nature vs. PLoS” kerffufle are sweet lullabies compared to most of the stuff I saw and suffered over the years online. One grows a thick skin, understands that people behave strangely online, laughs at the most egregious examples, and moves on.
There is no single definition of a “science blog”. Blog is a piece of software. You do what you want with it. If you are a scientist with a blog, or if you write more-or-less regularly about science (or meta-stuff, e.g., life in the lab, women in academia, politics of science funding….), then you can claim that your blog is a science blog. And your blog is going to be different from all other science blogs out there, as it is what you want it to be, reflecting your own interests, goals and personality. Nobody can tell you how to do it. There is no, and there should be no “template” or “definition” of a science blog – that is the beauty of the beast.
Thus, some blogs are serious, others not. Some are nice, some are inflammatory. Some focus 100% on latest peer-reviewed research. Others are a smorgasbord of everything the blogger feels like posting at any given time (like my blog, for instance). There is no recipe, no straightjacket, no “one right way” to do it. And that is what makes the science blogosphere so exciting and vibrant – so many cool voices, interesting personalities! Who says that scientists are socially-inept or bad communicators?!
well said bora. I appreciate the refreshing mix of a science, joking and politics on these blogs. Sure some are a bit unpleasant but those can mostly be ignored. It is important for scientists to engage with others outside our own small specialty as well as with the general public. Blogging is a good way to go.
Pedro – I have not been in this FF group for very long (one of its members invited me to join a few weeks ago). Although I agree with you that most posts and conversations are useful, informative, funny, robust, opinionated and so on
- all in a stimulating way -- there are plenty similar to the one Corie has linked here.For example, here is one FF “discussion” about a Sb post by GrrlScientist on a hippocratic oath for scientists.
Maybe some people would find this funny and pithy. I don’t find it so becuase it’s rude and superior: the writers “know” that the post they criticise in very harsh words is all those things they write about it. They don’t bother to say why. And not one member of the group has joined the dicsussion to add any more measured, rational or mature comments, in either agreement or disagreement with the Hippocratic oath idea, or even to point out that the language used about the GrrlScientist post is not to everyone’s taste.
Of course this is not limited to Internet groups — there are plenty of nasty comments on GrrlScientist’s blog post itself (including a strongly worded comment from her). As several above have said, including me, this behaviour is par for the course on the Internet for all the reasons people have said here and elsewhere.
Many people will just shrink from it, and not participate. And that’s a great pity.
Pedro – I don’ think blogs are old enough for anyone to have grown up with them.
… but I think there are sensible historical precedents. For me a blog (and to be honest, whether it’s a science blog or not is irrelevent) is a combination of that old favourite a newspaper comment column and a discussion in a pub centred on that column. As such, it’s a perfectly acceptable form in its own right.
If it happens to do any of:
… then so much the better, but I don’t think it’s really what it’s for.
I don’t think it’s really what it’s for.
Who cares what it’s for?
I don’t think it’s really what it’s for.
Who care’s what it’s for?
Me.
Twice, if necessary.
Well said, Sir. I am hust about to start another blog, if I can find the time, and if Mrs Gee doesn’t notice.
I look forward to it, as ever, with quivering anticipation.
Quivering.
In defense of Neil (Jenny seems to have ample allies), doesn’t he have a right to his opinion, too? I think his comment on FriendFeed was not out of the pale. It’s what he thinks, and he wasn’t unduly rude or personal, though if I was Jenny I would also have taken exception in my own comments.
Like any democracy, there’s room for all. I do think that given platforms tend to take on a particular culture, attracting both a certain consensus as well as its diametrically opposed detractors, but not so much the people in the middle who don’t care too much (witness ScienceBlogs). This is why my brother (a non-scientist) wouldn’t dream of signing up for NN. I, myself, am interested in both NN and the smaller community coalescing on FF (but whose threads are, currently, a little more challenging for me to follow). Interested in other fora as well. Keep them coming!
It was a little odd, Heather, that someone would come out with that in response to a thread that was actually pretty much on-topic. Disclaimer: I don’t know how FriendFeed works, but to complain of off-topicness in an off-topic comment is vaguely hypocritical. Grindstones, axes.
>shrug<
Well, one of the comments to the Nature News story about PLOS is:
‘Dr Clarke, don’t you realize that anything you say just throws oil on the fire’.
Some people aren’t interested in an evolving discussion, they are interested in a platform for the world to know their views and opinion. This person’s view is literally that nothing can be written that is contrary to what he or she thinks.
In one experience I had of being viciously castigated on a blog, I met the person concerned at a conference a few weeks later. Face to face, this person was niceness itself, and even complimented me as a “good friend” in a presentation. Which of those faces is the “real” one? How does one react to this type of behaviour? (This type of thing was going on for long before the Internet, of course, but it is all instantly globally public now: billions of people can read someone’s horrible attack on you within a nanosecond.)
The world, and the Internet, is what it is, and of course scientists are human (!) — the full range of personality types are included in the definition. I don’t expect anything to change about that. Systems will evolve to react to it: closed/gated communities; technical solutions involving user ranking so “bad” commenters aren’t visible; and others.
One particular sorrow, though, is that the scientific mode of thinking is widely misunderstood by many of the general public (which includes scientists). David discusses above the ghastly internet articles and comments on vaccines/autism. Other issues include climate science and reproductive biology. So much of what is written is shockingly, deliberately wrong and emotionally charged to put it mildly. Millions of people are being misled. Some scientists (and others) are doing a great job at applying clear, rational thought to these issues and writing blogs and so on, accordingly.
I think it is a pity when scientists who can think rationally about issues such as these and apply that thinking to their writings, can’t do the same thing for subjects that annoy them as people. (Or can’t restrain themselves from pressing the “submit this comment” button for 24 hours.)
Thanks for all the great comments everyone. Please keep them coming. Rather than trying to respond to all of them individually here, I will probably write a second post on this matter in a day or two, after mulling over what everyone’s said. Stay tuned.
I think there is probably something like a second law of thermodynamics for computer-mediated communication (CMC). These discussion fora have a natural tendency towards entropy. There is a tension between freedom of expression and control mechanisms to keep discussions on-topic and civil.
As Bora and others observe, this is not a new phenomenon. Biological groups on Usenet when I used to look at them in the 90s could get very heated. Email Listservs (and for the UK audience Mailbase/JISCmail) were a little less prone to problems as there tended to be stronger controls in place. Back in the 1990s we heard a lot about “Netiquette”. Perhaps it’s time to bring back something like that?
So, NN is full of fluff and FF is full of sharpness? As a friend of NN, I would have to agree that the comments on blogs here can get a bit fluffy. I think it’s down to expectations. If a reader expects interesting and relevant comments to follow an interesting and relevant initial post then it is frustrating to scroll through a large number of less serious comments to get to the useful ones. Some way of tagging and skipping would help, but that doesn’t sound very easy to achieve.
As for remaining civil, I agree that refraining from responding is often wise, or at least giving yourself time before responding. I recall from school days that one of the ways to judge a character in literature is “what s/he says about others”. Vitriolic comments often tell you more about the writer than the person commented on.
I should have added earlier…by highlighting the FriendFeed conversation about NN, I didn’t mean to single that group of researchers out as targets for criticism. And I definitely don’t want to set up any kind of NN vs FF comparison/rivalry! (We the NN team find the feedback on NN from the FF Life Scientists very helpful, so keep it coming, guys!)
I was just trying to move the discussion forward. Us editors of NN think a lot about how best to build and foster a community that’s open and welcoming and constructive for everyone so that’s why I’m asking all these questions.
As a friend of NN, I would have to agree that the comments on blogs here can get a bit fluffy.
So sue me.
Woof!
I spent a few days last week inadvisedly
harrowing helltaking part in a comment thread on Pharyngula and found that I was instantlyshat upon from a great heightattacked by people hiding behind pseudonyms who launched into the kind of invective which, if they’d said the same things in a real-world public space, would have gotten them arrested for threatening behavior. True, I gave as good as I got, with interest, but theexcusesreasons given for the level of native hostility expressed towards me was that some of theindigenous faunaregular contributors had served time battling creationists, who had been giving them a hard time, and they obviously didn’t see why they shouldn’t vent their accumulated spleen more generally.I’ve been thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that this is not a sufficient
excusereason to justify such behavior, if such behavior can be justified at all. It is analogous to excusing the Nazis their behavior because the Germans got a raw deal at Versailles.At least one knew where the Nazis were and where they lived – but for such violent hostility expressed towards one from pseudonyms was rather like straying inadvertently into a gay bar, ordering a beer and then getting shafted from behind with a truncheon.
My response is that I shall no longer be visiting sites where the accepted
bacterialculture is so noxious. I suspect that many others feel the same way, with the result that such blogs are populated solely by people swaggering around, just dying to throw a punch at the increasingly fewsuckerspeople stray within range.There is a really interesting discussion starting to develop more generally about the appropriateness of pseudonymous writing in the online science arena. OpenWetWare strongly encourage people to use their real name and other sites are moving in similar directions by insisting on insitutional email addresses for registration and similar.
I’ve also been put off recently by some pseudonymous rants that I thought were just bad science – and which I think wouldn’t have happened without the screen to hide behind. Yet I know a number of serious and thoughtful writers who feel a need to hide behind full or partial screens.
I wonder if we can crack the attribution and microcredit problems whether a lot of this will go away because people will want to use real names and will want to take responsibility for comments or blog posts because otherwise they won’t accumulate the credit. But will that mean that some people won’t feel able to contribute because they don’t feel ‘safe’. Does a right to privacy trump the right for attribution?
The other thing to note is the time delay effect. Everyone’s first response to something that irritates them is explosive. A problem with the read-write web as a medium is that it makes these explosions public and creates feedback loops where they get out of control. My own response to the Butler/Nature/PLoS dustup will naturally be a model of decorum and incisive writing when I actually get around to finishing it.
There’s been a great deal of study of failure patterns in online communities, and how to engineer good community interactions. What this literature shows is that the problems people are talking about in the comments here are often consequences of incomplete community design, not intrinsic problems of online communication.
I’m not very familiar with the literature, but can recommend Clay Shirky’s A Group is It’s Own Worst Enemy
Theresa Nielsen Hayden also has a great short and practical blog post
about the problem.
Interesting, Michael. Can you elaborate more on what you mean by ‘incomplete community design’? Do you mean technical features on a community site that can be better designed/implemented to somehow encourage good comments and weed out the not-so-good ones?
I will read what you’ve linked to here. Any more relevant resources you can point me to would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
I agree with many of the points made above by Bora, Maxine, Frank, Henry etc. I find blogs where the discussions rapidly descend into vitriolic exchanges a real turn-off. Part of the charm of NN is the fact that so many people are prepared to engage thoughtfully and constructively with the topic and the rest of the community. Yes there is a good measure of whimsy (I have some sympathy for Frank’s position on this) but I wouldn’t want to see that eliminated – the human touch is important too (as well as the ideas!).
This internet age of instantaneous world-wide communication is certainly challenging. Hastily composed emails or comments can easily send out the wrong message – they are not very nuanced forms of dialogue and should be used with care. It has struck me – though this may be an entirely fanciful simplification – that the elaborate courtesy that marks the composition of 18-19th century letters was necessitated by the fact that the correspondents were unlikely to see or hear from each other very frequently and so went to great lengths not to give unnecessary offence, which might simmer for months. But, just because the internet gives the capacity for instant reply, should we be any less respectful?
Maxine, the point you raise about which face is the “real” one is that you don’t know. You don’t know from a person on line, you don’t know from a person IRL. Someone could be being nasty for effect or being nice for effect in either place. You can’t know what someone is really like without getting to know them, and without them letting you get to know them, and without that person being authentic and consistent over time. You can’t control how the other person is going to behave, you certainly can’t control how they are going to think. The only person you can control is yourself.
I think you are better off knowing that someone has at least two sides to them. Ignorance may be bliss, but ignorance that someone is fake about some things isn’t.
“I think it is a pity when scientists who can think rationally about issues such as these and apply that thinking to their writings, can’t do the same thing for subjects that annoy them as people. (Or can’t restrain themselves from pressing the “submit this comment” button for 24 hours.)”
How do you really know that someone can think rationally about something? All you can know is their behavior. Are they behaving as if they are rational while underneath they are quite raving mad? Why is it that only scientists have an obligation to behave rationally? What about all the non-scientists? There are many people with many beliefs that have not the slightest basis in reality. Many of them take strong objection to this being pointed out to them in any format.
let me turn that round – why do scientists have that obligation? Is there a secret scientist gene?
I feel quite irrational sometimes.
I think it is the lack of censorship on one’s own blog that is most appealing to blog writers. If I want to write a review of a scientific paper and put it on my blog, no editor can censor it, or edit it, or remove it for reasons that have nothing to do with my opinions or the content of what I have written.
This is what is so appealing about an individual blog. My content is not edited or constrained to satisfy someone else’s wants. An editor or an author may be embarrassed that they let egregious mistakes through. A peer reviewer may not want a different vision of how the field should progress to be published.
With conventional peer reviewed literature and conventional editors, what can be published is limited by what the peers and editors think is sciencey" enough. What I mean by “sciencey” is analogous to "truthy Truthy is what people feel is true in their gut, not because they have any way to prove it. They just know it is true.
If an idea is outside the mainstream, if it violates some of the scientific paradigms that editors and peers hold important, they will do their best to ensure it never sees the light of day because it isn’t “sciencey” enough. Sciencey is driven by the ego of the scientist and what he/she feels is science, just as truthy is driven by the ego of the individual and what he/she feels is true.
Before their day had come, all the great ideas were not “sciencey” enough. The heliocentric solar system, evolution, germ theory of disease, quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, relativity, photoelectric effect, all were rejected by numbers of the experts of the day. Why? Not because they were wrong (because they were not wrong, they were correct), but because the peers evaluating them decided they were not “sciencey” enough.
There is some of that today. How much is hard to tell because it doesn’t get published. The peers who have decided against those ideas won’t let them be published or even be talked about. Some time ago I had a private phone conversation with a senior researcher in the NO field discussing my work in basal NO. He said that the basal NO level was zero. I replied it couldn’t be zero because there was no mechanism to make it zero, he said it was zero, that NO became bound to hemes, ended the conversation and refused all further contact with me.
Hemes only bind NO above a certain NO concentration. Below that concentration nitrosylated hemes release NO. Every mechanism for NO removal has NO concentration in its kinetics. As the NO level drops, the kinetics for its destruction go to zero before the NO concentration does. The idea of a non-zero basal NO level wasn’t “sciencey” enough for him. He couldn’t provide facts and logic to refute it, so he terminated communication.
It is like that with many ideas; ideas that peers don’t like are ignored and marginalized, not because they are wrong but because the peers don’t like them. Because the peers know more than editors in their specialty, the peers are able to “snow” the editors (even if unconsciously) and keep the peer’s spin on how the field should progress in the forefront. This is especially evident in some of the fringe journals, which have a very definite agenda and will publish nonsense if it fits their agenda (JPANDS for example).
There was a recent article in Science where the authors proposed a new term “proteostasis” with a meaning analogous to homeostasis but pertaining to protein networks and protein interactions. I wrote a comment objecting to the term because there is nothing static about such networks, that nothing in physiology is static, and that homeostasis is actually wrong and the term homeostasis should be discarded as misleading and useless. We didn’t need another term that was misleading and useless. The comment was rejected as being too divisive.
This kind of discussion occurs with some regularity, every 6 months or so. The latest round was at scienceblogs.com – go to the front page and look bottom right:
Ask a Science Blogger
Why do you blog, and how does blogging help with your research?
* Martin Rundkvist Says… * PhysioProf Says… * Janet Stemwedel Says… * Brian Switek Says… * Chad Orzel Says… * Drug Monkey Says… * Alice Pawley Says… * GrrlScientist Says…Also, see this post and links within:
http://scicurious.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/what-are-science-blogs-good-for-anyway/
Corie – I was talking about both the social and technical aspects. I’m far from expert on the literature about community design, but I’ve noticed that some friends who run online communities have a canon of literature they refer to, and which seems to contain a lot of wisdom. I’ve got it mentally bookmarked as something to look into in detail if I ever get into online community building seriously.
Corie – Meatball Wiki is an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about. It’s been dormant for a few years, but in the early 2000’s seems to have been pretty influential for some of the pioneers of social media, including the Wikipedia founders.
I agree with Michael. I think many people pay too little attention to the extra hurdles online communication brings. It can ‘just work’ in some cases, but in others it doesn’t. Cases where it works quite well are rather small groups of people who know each other (not necessarily personally) and who have a common background.
One of the biggest problems I have, and have noticed on other blogs, is that people don’t really make an effort to understand what was written, neglecting the fact that not everybody is a great writer and assume they must be able to extract information without any effort. It happens frequently that useless arguments circle around peripheral misunderstanding that is amplified by the problem to find the problem. It’s a lack of good will on both sides. One of my commenters once called that simply ‘A total communication failure’.
Interestingly, I also had to notice that at least on my blog the situation improved considerably after a year or so once the frequent commenters had gotten used to my writing and had gotten known my opinion on various topics.
Regarding what Bora said above about it depends on what you’re used to etc. I don’t think of myself as somebody who is overly sensitive to bitching, but there are limits to what I would find acceptable no matter in which circumstances. I wouldn’t even say that the community I come from is very polite, but what I’ve read online has been beyond the tolerable limit. In various instances, you could literally see such discussions spinning off. There is some point at which, in a normal discussion you’d expect people to just breath deeply, and either leave the room or drop the topic, from then on sitting in the back shaking their head with a dismissive expression on their face. That just doesn’t happen online. It’s the situation where people just ping back balls endlessly because who doesn’t reply has been defeated.
Btw, I was doing one of these bloggingheads diavlogs yesterday and the topic of blogs in maths/physics also briefly came up. It might take some while for the video to be online.
Michael Nielsen: The Clay Shirky article you pointed to sums up nicely a lot of the recurrent themes in online social communities. I enjoyed reading the story about the Communitree BBS. I only vaguely remember what a BBS looked like and I used it mostly to play MUD games :).
It is interesting to read about those re-occurring problems in different online communities. There are a couple of suggestions at the end that are maybe worth re-posting here for discussion. In the article Shirky refers to 4 design features:
1 – “The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.” (referring to persistent identity)
2 – “Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing.(…) The minimal way is, posts appear with identity. You can do more sophisticated things like having formal karma”
3 – “There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.” (referring to different types of users)
4 – “(…)find a way to spare the group from scale”
The article and his suggestions are framed as generally applicable to any online community. Maybe there are also important considerations for the specific case of scientific communities. Connecting to Cameron’s comment on attribution this could be yet another good reason to develop universal author IDs that could be use in online communities.
Here is also a link to an older text referenced by Shirky.
Thanks to the people who responded to my remarks above. There are many very interesting points in this thread. I hope we will have the chance to continue the discussion at Science Blogging 2008, as Corie suggests in her post.
Re the “fluffy” comments, though — my subjective impression is that, on Nature Network, the “fluffy” comments tend to appear in the blog comment threads, rather than in the forums, where the discussions seem to be in the main focused on the topic or question in the forum entry. Which makes sense. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this.
I found the abstract of an article via Improbable Research, which seems relevant.
Organization Studies, Vol. 26, No. 11, 1625-1640; 2005
You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations
David Sims
Cass Business School, London, UK
Our patience with forming interpretations and reinterpretations of others’ behaviour is not unlimited. The time comes when we lose interest in trying to understand, and conclude that another person is behaving in a way that is simply unacceptable. This paper explores the narratives that go with immoderate indignation, even for those best versed in the idea that they should attempt to understand the perspective of the other. The paper offers a reflexive comment on the difficulty of analysing such a topic, on the grounds that the phenomenon under discussion can debilitate analytic writing. Three narratives are discussed in which one person was seen as behaving in a despicable way by others. The description and analysis of the narratives are used to offer a narrative understanding of the process by which some people become indignant with others. It suggests a narrative construction of how sense is made of indignation, particularly in cases where two narratives come up against each other. It concludes by considering how the process of being indignant can produce conflicting emotions of joy and guilt for those involved.
Marc Abrahams of Improbable Research expounds on David Cass’s article (abstract above) in his Guardian column, which describes each case-history in a nutshell.
There is some point at which, in a normal discussion you’d expect people to just breath deeply, and either leave the room or drop the topic, from then on sitting in the back shaking their head with a dismissive expression on their face. That just doesn’t happen online. …[S/he] who doesn’t reply has been defeated.
Right on, Sabine – except that I think you underestimate the number of lurkers who might read the end of the discussion with said expression on their faces. And then they don’t go back to the forum at all, if they see too many of these discussions. I’m extrapolating from my own behaviour.
@Richard, I agree with your assessment of odd choice of thread to criticize, but I think the comment was in its place on Friendfeed. Anyhow, as usual with most of these kerfuffles, things seem to have died down fast.
@Maxine and Frank, of course we can only learn about the people with whom we interact online by what they write. So I would have judged that Jekyll/Hyde character by both behaviors – and fairly negatively at that – allowing the id to reign unchecked when anonymous, and socially acceptable behavior IRL. If they were trying to establish a lasting social interaction, they would apologize when they learned they had given offense and had gone past what at least one party might have considered friendly sparring.
I’m going to go paraphrase your post and comment thread, Corie, on my own blog, mostly because I don’t have any time left to develop a new issue :-)
By the way, although I don’t want to get into a ping-pong in which the last person to write “wins” ;-), I just want to say to Richard and David, that I certainly did not write (nor do I think) that “scientists have an obligation to act rationally”. A sentence or two I wrote has been quoted, interpreted in a certain way, and the interpretation then picked up. The quoted sentences are far clearer as to my meaning if read in the context of the whole comment I wrote, which is a chain of logic. Thank you.
Here’s a slightly tangential question – is it acceptable to reference articles in a blog/comment which other people can’t read without paying? I have a tendency to do this with, say New Scientist, and somewhat inevitably this happens on NN a lot with items from Nature.
Obviously such referencing is fine in a formal environment, but shouldn’t a blog be a transparent read that lets you follow through links without someone trying to extract cash?
I guess what I’m saying is, should there be a convention that links from blogs, with their more social/chatty flavour, are open rather than to closed systems?
Re: _ Some way of tagging and skipping would help, but that doesn’t sound very easy to achieve._
Slashdot the news for nerds site uses karma and mod points to rank posts on a scale from -1 to 5, and flags comments as offtopic, flamebait, troll, informative, insightful, etc. They also have a mass moderation system whereby anyone can potentially become a moderator for a day (or 3) and good citizens among the community who accumulate positive karma (by posting positive comments for the most part) get more opportunities to moderate the discussion. Moderators are also neutral, in that they are not the ones who contributed the initial content for a thread. There is lots more about how the system evolved and works now on their faq. Something worth considering here at NN, and elsewhere in the science blogosphere?
Let me follow Brian’s tangent and say that I share his and Greg’s concern about linking to pay-per-view websites from blogs, and fret about it when posting items to my own blog, especially because I get a fair number of readers from India who are unlikely to have online access to non-public-access journals. If I must link to an article behind a pay-firewall, I try to find links to author websites where reprints may be available, or offer to email pdfs to interested readers because I have access myself. I’m not sure the latter is strictly above board (do I have the right to distribute content from other authors?), but don’t see an easy way around it. It really is frustrating to be trying to increase science communication among the general public, to broaden the scientific discourse, when the paper one wants to talk excitedly about is not easily available!
_is it acceptable to reference articles in a blog/comment which other people can’t read without paying? _
This is a bit tricky in this online world. There are some occasions when you can find an acceptable substitute – e.g. if it is a second-hand report of research or news then you can probably find a free report or press release somewhere. But if you want to discuss some finely-observed point from a respected commentator, or an original research article, then I think you have little choice unless you refrain from discussing it altogether.
I would also add that it can be difficult to know what is available for free and what isn’t.
You could try linking to the PubMed abstract as an alternative – at least your reader can then read something of the article. Or try and locate the paper in an institutional repository – sometimes this will have a link to email the author for a reprint.
Yes, Frank is quite correct, you can’t often tell. If you are in a university or other institution with a site licence, you won’t automatically know if the content you are linking to is for subscribers, registration-only or free to access without registration.
As far as I am aware, abstracts are free at all publishers’ sites, as well as in PubMed and other free A&I services – certainly that is my experience when searching, and is the case for all articles at nature.com journals. You have the option of creating a link to the abstract (the free part) in all articles, as well as full text and PDF versions.
….or do I mean “you often can’t tell”?
Juan Carlos Lopez, Chief Editor of Nature Medicine, has written a very good post on the journal’s Spoonful of Medicine blog about behaviour in the blogosphere, in the context of people’s opinions about open access publishing. The post is triggered by Nature’s News piece on the PLOS finances, but is far broader than a comment on that article, and I hope people will read it. Thanks!
All things being equal, I will cite an open access article over one behind a pay wall. Certainly in blogs, but also elsewhere. I can only cite something that I have a copy of and have read, and there are lots of things behind pay walls that I can’t read because I don’t have access.
An objection I have to the regular media when they write about a recent article is that they don’t provide a link or even a citation, even to the abstract.
I like a lot of the older journals because they have historic data that is not available elsewhere. There was a recent article on how acute fever resolves some of the symptoms of autism, which directly fits into my ideas on how autism is caused by low NO. Fever therapy (giving people malaria and letting them go through ~10 cycles of fever over 40 days) was the standard of care for neurosyphilis for decades. Data on things like that isn’t available in recent literature. Studies can’t be done like that now because they are unethical.
I understand the business model that keeps 50 year old papers locked behind a pay wall is about making money off of any asset. In some cases those papers are only available by subscription to the entire archive for many hundreds of dollars. That business model that makes a 50 year old paper costs more than a current one. To me that is just as good as unavailable and so I proceed not knowing what they contain. I don’t like that I can’t read and cite papers that are obviously relevant to what I am writing about.
Over at Science Blogs, PZ Myers calls for people to steal consecrated hosts so he can desecrate them in public, and John Wilkins argues that this is somehow neither blasphemous nor offensive, thus giving licence for the desecration of any religious artefact or symbol. So what we have here is ScienceBlogs hosting something that is, in my view, an incitement to religious hatred (if not to commit a crime), and another member of ScienceBlogs who thinks this is acceptable. I think that Myers has certainly gone beyond what’s acceptable in the blogosphere, and Wilkins, in not posting outright condemnation, might also have strayed close to that line.
Yow. I find the Roman Catholic hysteria difficult to swallow (a little like communion wafers, actually. I much prefer real bread) but PZ Myers has really jumped the shark here.
He’s just out for page hits. You do know that Sciencebloggers get paid according to how much traffic they get, right?
’Nuff said. Follow the money.
Oh, that explains it. So page hits are sort of like impact factors then? The higher the page hits the more important and prestigious the blog?
I think it’s more like ‘the higher the page hits the more money they get’.
So it is more like career advancement and pay raises being determined by publication citation index?
Are editors of journals ever incentivized that way? Monetary bonus dependant on the journal’s impact factor? Or is a hearty “well done!” enough of a reward?
It’s more like a hearty “well done” … :)
Is that true – That Science Bloggers get paid by the comments they get? Don’t mind the quality, feel the width.
Don’t know about the comments per se, but it’s definitely traffic… maybe peanuts, but money none the less.
Funnily enough, it’s John Wilkins who claims to be getting richer off Scienceblogs, along with PZ.
What about the art, man?
David: you might like to join the citation in science Nature Network forum, where topics such as those you address are being discussed.
I am not aware of journal editors being paid by impact factor of the articles they choose to publish, but it is the case that in some countries, scientists are paid for publishing “high-impact” papers, or otherwise rewarded. There have been several news articles about this practice, in Nature and elsewhere.
As far as blog and internet “prestige” is concnerned, I have no knowledge of or comment on how the ScienceBloggers at Seed are paid, but in general, Google “page rank”, Technorati and so on use number of links and other traffic-referral metrics to rank blogs. Apologies if everyone knew this already.
Huffington Post, incidentally, is proud of the fact that it does not pay any of its bloggers. The future of US newspaper reporting, as is often written.
Wikipedia on Huffington Post
I am relatively new to blogging. My interest in it is as a relatively ancient scientist whose interests have turned to the place of science in society. I can see from the commnets in this thread that blogging answers to a lot of interests and needs among scientists. That is all well and good, but as I look around the blogosphere, I don’t see much that entails interactions between scientists and non-scientists – the public, if you will. Non-scientists are not likely to read most of the science-related blogs I’ve found. Perhaps some of you can point me to places I may have missed. I have recently completed a book,Imperfect Oracle: The Authority and Moral Authority of Science in Society, which deals with the various ways in which science does, or does not, exericse authority and influence in the affairs of society. Thebook will be published by Penn State University Press next spring or summer. I have a chapter on Science and the Public, in which I have delved a bit into the public’s understanding of, and interests in, science. As most of this group will appreciate, it is pretty low.One way to improve on that, if we can find ways to do it, is to use blogging as a way to make contact with the non-scientific public. I’m thinking of starting a blog with that sort of goal, but I need first to learn more about what makes for a good blog. Any thoughts or advice?
Hi Theodore,
There are many science blogs that are geared towards the public and aim to better inform the public about science. I think blogs like RealClimate and Panda’s Thumb fall into this category, but there are many more. Many of the blogs on Scienceblogs also do this, including Not Exactly Rocket Science and others. I hope others will post links to their favorite blogs-for-the-public.
I’ve done this already in another forum (Science Blogging) but I like the Women in Science blog I discovered relatively recently. It sounds boring and worthy, but it isn’t. If schoolgirls read this blog, they would find it an inspiration to choose a scientific career (so long as they have some degree of interest in science in the first place!)