So this June I was invited to collaborate on a new exciting project: a Science Communication Journal Club! Since graduating in May, I already took the initiative to develop more science communication skills.. thus I joined immediately! 🎓
What is the journal club all about? From our website:
Science Communication Journal Club is aimed at easing the overwhelm associated with your science outreach responsibilities.We summarize the latest peer reviewed literature as well as reports and surveys and deliver them to you in the form of regular Twitter chats and blog articles.
This week, we had our first twitter chat, hosted by Dr. Sherry Nouraini – the club’s creator! The topic was Becoming a “Nerd of Trust” on Facebook (and we discussed this paper),
Twitter chats can be overwhelming to follow, so I also did a live video on my Instagram page 🎥. I was curious to see if this format adds anything useful, and I believe it did! If someone doesn’t have time to closely follow a busy Twitter conversation for the entire hour, they can tune into the live video while multitasking. + you can make the livestream be viewable for 24 hours! So you can always watch it a bit later.
In the livestream, I summarized the paper, and then expanded on some of the posts in the chat (as well as my own answers and interpretations of the paper). I believe it’s a great accompaniment to the chat and I plan to do the same next month!👍
Take-home points
Now, there will be a summary post on this month’s Twitter conversation soon (posted on the club’s website), but here’s my short overview:
Facebook can be a FANTASTIC intervention point to dispel scientific misconceptions, because so many people use it for news and to share articles.. many of them being poor sources. And you as a scientist have an advantage- people in your FB network actually KNOW you personally, so we’d expect they trust your expertise. And yet….. I feel like some serious barriers for scientists to use FB are:
- Time commitment (indeed! the article discusses this a lot)
- Cognitive burden (i stress this!! Would you rather engage the public on Twitter or your own relatives and friends?? After all, you can simply block rude individuals on Twitter and forget about them.. But things can get exhausting with family, especially on controversial topics like genetic engineering of foods)
- Lack of incentives (both the paper and I emphasize this strongly). See:
I’ve been doing a lot of job applications lately, and some of them specifically ask for my Twitter account. So they surely do care whether you are engaged in science communication. Well, nobody’s going to ask you to show your personal Facebook account- so unfortunately Twitter provides you with more incentives from this perspective.
Join us for the next Twitter chat on October 3rd!
Mariya V. PhD 