Oh dear, I apologize if I was not clear. I do not object to using social media. My concern is with using them as metrics of science quality and more generally for outreach.
Amongst my concerns are fake and irrelevant postings on Twitter, the ability to buy likes on Facebook, both censorship of various groups and spamdexing on Reddit. Check out the tweets for Origin of the Species. One obviously wants to push one's presence on social media. Universities have PR departments that do this with varying degrees of competence. Then there are people you can pay to help you with this by gaming the system. Manipulating citation rates already occurs, so if social media become valued as metrics for science, they will be gamed. Gaming citations requires a certain degree of effort, papers published over months or years; gaming social media merely requires a credit card number, a computer and a few seconds. Also who are we twittering to? Our friends and colleagues? How is this outreach to the general public? How many nuances can be contained in 144 words? A deeper question might be how social media reflect the enduring value of scientific articles. Citation equations exist to measure impact over time but social media are by their nature much more immediate. An analogy might be to movie openings. With a bad film, distributors will try to open in as many theaters as possible and advertise like crazy, to generate traffic the first weekend before word gets out that the film stinks. A good paper would be more like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, persisting for decades. RHPC has 7 tweets and 61 followers; Fast and Furious has 25.9 K tweets and 43.5 K followers. Will Fast and Furious still be showing in theaters in 30 years (not to say Fast and Furious is a bad film, I haven't seen it)? As I said, I am not against social media. I spent about an hour today working on my group's Facebook page and, in my other job as president of a faculty union, we employ two folks to help us with social media. I am against simply assuming that social media are effective for science, either as metrics or as outreach. And I have to ask if social media are so effective for science, why do so many people not believe in evolution or vaccination, while believing in extraterrestrials, horoscopes, ghosts and other things that go bump in the night? David Duffy On Wed, Apr 15, 2015 at 1:28 PM, Caitlin Littlefield <clitt...@uw.edu> wrote: > As a millennial ecologist(-in-training), I regularly skim through the TOCs > of most ecological journals, and I certainly see many articles circulated > through email. But a non-trivial amount of my exposure to new science is > through the Twitter feeds of the journals themselves, scientific > organizations, and ecologists I respect. So I'll respectfully disagree > with your implied conclusion that for science to be "taken seriously", we > must remain aloof of social media. Furthermore, if social media is an > avenue for the general public to read about/engage in/comment on science, > then I do indeed think Tweet-ability can be one metric by which articles > are assessed. And perhaps it ought to be, if it encourages researchers to > communicate their science in a way that's accessible to others outside of > their disciplines, to the general public, and even to the Kardashians. > > -- David Duffy 戴大偉 (Dài Dàwěi) Pacific Cooperative Studies Unit Botany University of Hawaii 3190 Maile Way Honolulu Hawaii 96822 USA 1-808-956-8218
