The Times lists the 50 most popular celebrities on Twitter today – prompting me to ask, where are the scientists on that list?
Well… anyone?
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Scott's miscellanies by Scott Keir
I think this is going to be a fairly varied collection of posts on stuff to do with art, science, culture, geekery and science communication. But we'll see, eh? And, just to be clear, what I type here is my own opinion, not my employers'.
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Where are the celebrity science twitterers?
- Date:
- Thursday, 05 Feb ruary 2009 - 23:17 UTC
(If you don’t know what Twitter is, see my sidebar footnote below1 )
The Times list is fascinating (and presumably accurate) – Stephen Fry is arguably the most famous British Twitterer, but the relative popularity of the rest of the list is fascinating – John Cleese just trumps Jonathan Ross; Andy Murray just beats Andi Peters; Elijah Wood Wood and Michael Phelps are bubbling near the bottom.
But where are the scientists? The nearest we get on that list is Al Gore or Stephen Fry, as science-friendly celebrities from media and politics.
DIUS Science team is on Twitter, and there are plenty of technology and computing types, but what about the old-fashioned scientists?
Well… none on the Times’ list. What about Robert Winston (on the BBC One show the other day), or Marcus du Sautoy (who blogs ), or… oh, who else is well known in science?
Even Richard Dawkins, probably Britain’s most famous scientist, is not on Twitter although bizarrely, someone is pretending to be him.
David Bradley has a list of science twitterers and the most well-known scientist I’ve been able to find is Richard Wiseman, the media-friendly psychologist.
Is this indicative of the general lack of celebrity scientists? Or is this part of the whole conversation about why scientists do or do not blog?
Would scientists reporting on their daily science life via twitter be a good thing? Or another distraction? Are scientists using Twitter for inter-lab collaboration?
Updated 8am, 6 Feb: (I meant to save this for adding my thinking bit later, but published it, I was sleepy…)
I guess that:- Twitter will be more popular with the tech-savvy and new-technology savvy (which perhaps biases toward some types of scientists) and more understandable to those that use Facebook’s status updates (which perhaps biases to younger scientists).
- There are fewer publicly celebrity scientists out there, but there are plenty of scientists that are highly-cited, which would make them popular (or influential) in their subjects. But would you follow any of them on Twitter just because they have published some useful papers? I suspect not.
- Given the conversations on here and at the Science Blogging conference about how and why scientists take up blogging, firstly, Twitter is perhaps even more alien, more insubstantial, and harder to justify than blogs. Secondly, if you look at Martin Fenner’s taxonomy of blog-types, only a couple of these reasons for blogging are ones that Twitter can help with – I think mainly Martin’s news and summary categories, and perhaps the watercooler and personal categories too. These are unlikely to be more widely popular.
- Institutions are using Twitter as a form of RSS feed/news feed – and there would seem to be a role for that at the lab level – updates on papers published, conferences attending, lab members joining etc. I’d have thought that would be an improvement on how scientists find out what their colleagues are up to at the moment.
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1 To start at the start, Twitter is a service that allows people to send out and receive short messages to each other. These are of a maximum of 140 characters – the same maximum length as a single text message.
Twitter say that they want you to answer the question “What are you doing?” with each “tweet” (not “twit”, apparently :o) And the initial, public suggestion was that this be about friends communicating with friends – a bit like the facebook status update system, which you may be familiar with. Your tweets are public, usually, and you can choose to “follow” other people’s too. That is, when you log in to Twitter, you see a list of the people that you are following’s most recent tweets, ordered by time. You can also choose to receive these updates by text message too (either everyone’s, or a select few). You can also direct tweets at individual Twitter users, and they can tweet back – again, these are public.
In the early days, a lot of Twitter seemed to be inane and banal – “Off to the shops”, “Lunch was yum”, “On the toilet, lol” type messages. So much so, it led one of my pr friends to refer to Twitter by a slightly ruder rhyme. That said, another group of friends used to organise their trips to the pub entirely by Twitter, using it as a form of group communication.
Twitter has also been taken on by commercial and public bodies – perhaps most famously in the UK by Tony and Gordon at 10 Downing Street as a way of providing short, rapid updates on their activities. Sort of like a networked, specialised RSS feed.
You can manage your twitter account using applications that sit on your computer desktop, or integrate it in your RSS feed, or whatever. I just log in every day or so, that suits me fine.
The joy and pain of Twitter is its brevity and instantaneousness. It is joyous as you can get live reports from events or on activities as they happen – eg, the “reports on Twitter from the Science and Innovation event”: http://twitter.com/ScienceSoWhat at 10 Downing Street last week. And they are short enough that you can tell if you want to find out more fairly easily. They collected questions for the ministers at that event via Twitter too (which, handily, forced the questions to be brief). And typing out your own tweet doesn’t take that long to do.
It is painful as 140 characters allows you to say very little of substance, and it is easy to be misinterpreted. A recent example of this is James Andrews, who markets himself as The Key Influencer and a social media guru. He was visiting one of his clients, and twittered a message when he arrived at the airport “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” The client saw that tweet, and took that to be an insult aimed at the town that they were based in – and took offence to the point where they made inferences of cancelling their contract (see this blog for details.) James later claimed that his tweet was done in hasty frustration, and was meant to comment on an individual not the town.
A further pain is that you can receive so many tweets that they can be overwhelming, though this is counterbalanced by the idea that personal tweets shouldn’t be important, just interesting – you can dip in and out as you like. I can’t imagine ever wanting to get text message versions of tweets for that reason.
They can be useful for getting occasional updates from professional bodies that twitter. I’ve set up a twitter account for the R&D Society and have started following similar innovation-type organisations – DIUS, Technology Strategy Board staff and the like. Twitter seems to work on a quid pro quo basis – if you want people to follow you, it is polite to follow them too. So far, most of the organisations send a tweet or so a day, so nothing overwhelming. I’ve used it to report on what the R&D Society is doing – once every few days or so. And one esteemed journalist said that they picked up on a press comment the R&D Society issued because they had caught my twitter. (Which is interesting, as I had also emailed him.)
A second use for freelancers could be to feel that they are connected to the outside world. I know that one of my freelance friends, who works from home, likes dipping into Twitter and Facebook to get some “office gossip” type information – background chatter from friends.
Last updated: Thursday, 05 Feb 2009 - 23:17 UTC
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Comments
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Ben Goldacre is on there… but he’s a medic, really.
“Is this indicative of the general lack of celebrity scientists? Or is this part of the whole conversation about why scientists do or do not blog?”
Yes. And yes, probably.
Also, that’s both ridiculously long for a footnote, but also one of the best explanations of Twitter I’ve seen so far. This is why I always read the footnotes.
Not a scientist per se, but this is probably the most famous science-related Twitterer – http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix
Oh thanks guys. Bit of a red face here, I meant to save it and add my views tonight, as I wasn’t going to finish the post before I went to bed. But I selected publish rather than save, so…
I’ve added my thoughts to the end of the main block of the article.
I like both the examples given – the Mars Phoenix twitter is a great example of
Also, that’s both ridiculously long for a footnote, but also one of the best explanations of Twitter I’ve seen so far. This is why I always read the footnotes.
Yes, it is ridiculously long, but I am glad it was useful. I wrote it for an email I posted to the ABSW mailing list where they were discussing the value of twitter to journalists, and thought I could recycle it here, as it took me a while to understand twitter and thought it would help others. Perhaps I should have published it as a separate post and linked to it. Hmm…
Don’t know about celebrity science twitterers but have people seen the twitter feed from the ScienceSoWhat site? Was launched to great fanfare last week with the Science Minister and (I think) the PM twittering… But take-up seems to have been slow.
I joined Twitter the day it started, as one of my book blogging friends was instantly keen and created various apps (eg TwitterLit). I hated it, mainly because it was always crashed, but also I failed to get the point. I am one of those people who does not want to know what is going on constantly, or that Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift somewhere.
I relatively recently re-activated my account because I had discovered Friend Feed, another microblogging platform but which suits me much better. You can aggregate all your online activity at FF – Twitter, Facebook, blog(s), bookmarks, Flikr and loads of others, so you don’t have to actually go to any of these sites ;-). You can set it up reciprocally so that FF exports to (say) Twitter or FB, so if you have friends who aren’t like Eva ;-), and who only use Twitter or FB, they can see what you are doing even though you are on FF. FF also allows you to have “rooms”, eg for conference liveblogging or to discuss books, or anything. It is a very nice, user friendly platform and for me (a non-news/gossip junkie) it is perfect. I can then read the filtered news and comment once a day in my newspaper and once a day in my RSS reader.
There may not be many scientists Twittering, but there aren’t many blogging or using web 2.0, outside certain communities or groups. Probably the reasons are similar, or some of them.
PS FF also lets you selectively blank out applications, either across the board or for individuals – eg I can subscribe to Stephen Fry but blank his Twitters, only see his blog posts, type of thing. I think that Twitter is more primitive in the customization it allows the user, or at least as far as I can find out it is.
I am one of those people who does not want to know what is going on constantly, or that Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift somewhere.
[snerk]
:-D
There are many science writers on twitter – too many to mention. Also a number of editors from scientific journals and magazines. There are science policy types, even the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology
Also, scientific journals and their press rooms are increasingly present (PLOS , JACS , ACS , RSC)
So it is fair to say that those relaying science to the public are widely present. And so are numnerous science PhDs and postdocs. But none of the major PI’s I know are there. They might simply be too busy at this stage?
Finally, I am not sure why we should look for celebrity science twitters? Science is mostly done far beyond the celebrity status, and similarly I find the interactions with the “non-science celebrity” twitterers quite useful as is. My only gripe is not to see more senior professors joining.
@Maxine: I think the twitter interface is deliberately simple. Twitter is a really open system and many people wrote their own platforms for it. TweetDeck for example allows grouping your subscribers.
Thanks, Joerg! I’m sticking with Friend Feed because I like it and because life’s too short! Thanks for pointing out all those journals using Twitter – I might check them out – as I keep getting “followed” by an increasingly bizzare collection of people (who are they?) and institutions (eg Royal Shakespeare Company). How they find me is anyone’s guess.
Maxine, I think the reason is a strange cult on twitter related to the number of followers one has. Some people follow lots of random users in the hope to be followed back. This strategy gives you a huge number of followers, although it mostly means that you are actually not listening what others have to say, which to me seems totally agains what I like about twitter. So to my mind the number of followers doesn’t mean anything. I think oneshould only follow those people you are interested in to hear more, and not worry about follower numbers.
Also, if I may make the point that I do not necessarily see the benefit of cross-posting FB and FF messages to twitter. Particularly the FF comment tweets often seem to make no sense whatsoever unless you follow the link in the tweet, which can be irritating.
Finally, a nice quote by @boris “Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you’d like to know better”
Not sure what I think about the idea of “celebrity scientists,” whether they tweet or not! But here are a couple of more general thoughts on Twitter and scientists:
Twitter provides a great way for scientists to engaging with “normal” people – OK, so it can be rather shallow, but it allows you to plug in to and participate in a broad community.
But here’s the rub – people will follow who they find interesting. Probably the number one reason why most scientists on Twitter don’t have a huge number of followers is that there are a lot of people out there who have better thinks to think/talk about.
Which means that if scientists are to be a significant part of the mix, they need to have a presence as normal, interesting people.
Having said this, I agree with Joerg that one of the best ways to approach Twitter as a scientist is to develop a community of people who you enjoy communicating with, and who enjoy communicating with you – quality, not quantity, every time!
If celeb scientists are reading this, feel free to get in touch and I’ll add you to my scientwists list – http://bit.ly/scientwists
Meanwhile, I’ll have a chat with Mark Lewney (the Jimi Hendrix of Physics), see if he’s planning to tweet…if he isn’t already
I completely agree with the comment about Facebook vs. Twitter — I have only used them for a few months now since leaving Nature (only now actually having time to do so) and Twitter is more for people you would like to know, or hear their thoughts.
I would submit that Twitter simply has not reached critical mass yet amongst scientists. Value must be demonstrated for widespread uptake. And I think it will always be the scientists who are interested in communicating like “normal, interesting people” (which can be an oxymoron) who see the value.
An example: I had to appear on local TV last week to talk about DNA testing for Salmonella. I twittered that I was looking up data on the internet. Within 5 minutes I had 3 responses, the most helpful from NPR’s Science Friday program, on good links to check out. There’s no question in my mind that science could benefit from this kind of instant sharing of information.
“if you have friends who aren’t like Eva ;-)”
…heeeeyyyy!
I didn’t delete my FriendFeed account, though. For two reasons: 1. I might want to use it in the future for conference liveblogging purposes and 2. IT WAS NOT POSSIBLE. It’s undeletable! It just made me dislike FriendFeed even more…
But I’ve already been caught lurking on there anyway. It’s unavoidable, especially because some people ;) feed their FF into Twitter and I tend to be curious and click on things.
O.K. Scott. I won’t take up real estate on your post but I have had a post (a look at twitting science) sitting on my computer for a long time and forgot about it till you put this up. So if you would like my interpretation of twitting science take a look.
Scott – I concur with Eva – thank you for the description of what Twitter is. I’ve been a bit bewildered by references to it recently.
And, having read your description, I have to say that it all sounds terribly irritating. 140-character soundbites? It would be like watching text soccer commentary online.
I shall stick with the tried and true at Nature Network, which is of itself probably more information that I can comfortably handle. Although Maxine has recently suggested FriendFeed to me…
*gets lost and confused in teh intarwebs
What’s soccer?
In a more
usefulon topic comment, while I don’t do Twitter, I subscribe to Stephen Fry’s blog, and liked his post this week on his competition to write the best Tweet that incoroporates lots of the letter L.Jim Hendler wonders if computer scientists count. (Via Twitter, natch.)
I don’t think they do. With all due respect to computer scientists, it seems that when we’re talking about issues of scientists adapting these kinds of things, they don’t fall in the same category. They’re much more likely to fiddle with newfangled computer things than a chemist or a biolgist or even a phycisist. The whole established way of “this is what we used to do” doesn’t really affect them as much when it comes to technology. Computer science is all about trying and discovering and studying and developing newfangled computer things.
Twitter and FriendFeed are different and I find FriendFeed much more useful. On the other note, Jerry Coyne now has a blog
I agree that Twitter and FF are different – each person has different reqirements and there are plenty of applications out there so one can customise.
Joerg – we had some discussion (naturally) on FF about this “export to FB/Twitter” function – most liked it but Eva did not (hence my “smiled” aside). There are plenty of reasons given at FF as to why people find it useful – though, of course, it would not be for everyone. Also, to clarify about the “followers”, Joerg, yes indeed, I watch them all follow me but it is rare for me to “follow back”.
We are all so time-limited. For me, a combination of RSS reader, Friend Feed and Nature Network is perfect – clicking through as I need to. For others, different combinations will work. I am not a coder so would not be interested in, say, developing a Twitter app – I just want to use something “already there” that allows me to filter and customise at a high level. NN, FF and RSS are all great for that – for me
(eg I use RSS to subscribe to tales of contents of journals, to blogs, and other online publications; I use Friend Feed rooms and Nature Network to find out what is going on in areas that interest me and to talk about it with others sharing those interests.)
Here’s a direct link to David Bradley’s (above) blog post collecting together science twitterers. Whether any of them are celebrities, though – up to you to decide!
Thanks for the link Maxine, despite the URL referring to 100 scientific twitter friends, that number has almost doubled since I first posted it and is still growing. Anyone who wants to be on this list of suspects, should tweet me, retweet the link, or leave a comment on the post itself and I’ll add you.
If anyone is doubting the absolute EXPLOSION of Twitter since David’s article was published, here are the latest stats for the Top 100 Twitter users based on followers. Granted, the list contains entities other than just individual celebrities, but many are on both lists. Just look at the numbers.
Sorry, not David’s article…the Times article….David has the posting of science Twitterfeeds…
I think maybe it has something to do of the pace of science versus the rapid nature of daily tweets. I would imagine for the average, non-celeb scientist it would be something like this:
did plasmid prep and ran new constructs on agarose gel
western blotting sucks. why can’t I get a good antibody to my protein?
someone unplugged my incubator last night. was it the janitor?
i think rick is having an affair with jane from the Johnson lab
@john get your own lysis buffer
etc…
Well… none on the Times’ list. What about Robert Winston (on the BBC One show the other day), or Marcus du Sautoy (who blogs ), or… oh, who else is well known in science?
Marcus is now on Twitter, and apparently Twitter helped him with a Sexy Maths column for the Times. Don’t think it was this blog post that got him to join…