Internet interactivity has changed the way that science is communicated

Assessment is by specialists attending the 13th International Public Communication of Science and Technology Conference in Salvador.

By Elton Alisson, in Salvador

Agência FAPESP – The new platforms of Web 2.0 – i.e., interactive uses of the Internet, such as blogs and social networks – have transformed how science is communicated and have increased the dissemination of scientific content in several countries, including Brazil.

This assessment was performed by experts participating in a panel to discuss the use of social media in science communication during the 13th International Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) Conference, held May 5-8 in Salvador, Bahia.

With the central theme “Science communication for social inclusion and political engagement,” the meeting was held in Latin America for the first time and brought together researchers from more than 50 countries to discuss science communication and the dissemination practices and strategies adopted in various parts of the world.

“With the advent of new online media, traditional views of science communication are being redefined,” said Dominique Brossard, professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communications at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“We have increasingly more science blogs in various countries, which in large part are written not by scientists or science journalists but by laymen with specific interest in particular scientific subjects, who, in trying to understand the science, have produced content in a way that was not done ten years ago,” said Brossard, who is in charge of the Science, Media and the Public Research Lab (SCIMEP) at the aforementioned university.

According to Brossard, in addition to blogs, other social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, have had a strong impact on public involvement in science and technology.

More empirical data are needed, however, to assess the actual scope of this impact, how the public relates to these new media, and how information is disseminated through these new means of communication, the researcher said.

“Several studies have shown that social networks are contributing to the dissemination of news about various topics, including science and technology, and that the public is very much in favor of publishing news on social networks,” she added.

“However, the research into online science communication still presents many challenges, and more studies are needed to prove our hypotheses, which are different from those held with regard to traditional media,” Brossard stated.

According to the researcher, certain recent studies – such as the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2013, published in July of last year by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University in the United Kingdom – have indicated that the public is increasingly reading news online. This trend is no different for news about science and technology.

“People are increasingly turning to online environments to find information about science and technology and to keep up with scientific developments,” said Brossard.

“In many countries, people are increasingly looking for science information through search engines like Google instead of searching specific sources, like major newspapers in their country,” Brossard explained.

One characteristic of the news stories published today in the online universe, according to the researcher, is that they are increasingly contextualized; in other words, they are accompanied by comment sections and “tweeted” and “retweeted” or copied on social networks.

According to Brossard, these news “trails” may be used as indicators for researchers of communication science to obtain empirical data for studies about online communication. “They can provide clues that enable us to analyze the effect that news has on science, for example, in the online universe,” she said.

One of the findings obtained in a study performed by her group at SCIMEP, based on several of these “contextual clues,” as she calls them, is that comments published about a news item can change how readers interpret the item.

“We discovered that comments can change the perception and opinion held by other readers with regard to the findings of a scientific study in an article published in an online platform,” Brossard said.

To minimize this effect, certain vehicles, such as the science communication journal Popular Science in the United States, have decided to deactivate the reader comment section in their online editions, said the researcher. “This action gave us empirical evidence for our conclusions,” Brossard explained.

Public dialog

According to the panel participants, despite social media’s contribution to increasing the communication of science-related content in the world, it is little used and exploited by science communicators.

Both science journalists and scientists are underrepresented in the digital universe, they explained.

“Scientists and science journalists need to adapt to and be more present in these new media,” said Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East, a website of the British science journal that focuses on science-related news from the Arab world.

“To that end, they need to be ready to hear what the public wants to know and to be open to often-terrible comments about their work, as well as to receiving very good suggestions that may be used to improve the narrative of their stories about scientific discoveries,” he explained.

In Yahia’s opinion, social media allow science communicators to get closer to the public and to increase engagement in the stories that they tell.

One experiment in certain European countries and the United States, he said, is science podcasts – audio files transmitted over the Internet – in which listeners are invited to respond to a particular question about a scientific problem. The responses are then incorporated into upcoming episodes.

“Science communicators need to involve their public in the production of their stories,” Yahia said. “When this is done, the public also feels that it owns the story told and is more interested in researching a specific scientific subject and in adding and sharing information,” he said.