Science on teh internets: an interview with Drs Mendel & Riesch

Having run a series of short interviews with UK-based science bloggers, I've also talked to a couple of colleagues who are developing research on the 'bad science' blogging community.

Jon Mendel is a geographer at Dundee with a background in studying networks, virtual war and security. Interested in how new media are functioning or not functioning in the case of science blogs and in the role and efficacy of networked forms here.

Hauke Riesch researches public understanding/engagement/involvement/awareness/whatever of science and risk at Cambridge, having previously written a PhD on philosophy in popular science books. Among other things. Next to everything social to do with risk and new technologies, he is interested in how scientists think about science, how they communicate it, and how they think about communicating it.

Firstly, can you give us some idea of the methodology you applied to your study?

We drew on our participation in and observation of the development of this community, from its establishment through to some of the interesting activism episodes in which the community participated.

We used an e-mail qualitative survey: we emailed a list of questions to established members of the community on their blogging activities and their thoughts about science blogging in general and this community in particular.


The paper you presented at the Science and Public conference started by noting there is a lot of hope surrounding science blogging - what do you think those hopes are?

Blogging in general has attracted a lot of hope about how it can democratise the public sphere: anyone can in principle get themselves and their ideas heard and the small army of potential fact-checkers and arguers can shed light on issues where we would previously have relied on a small and overworked group of professional journalists. However there may be barriers inherent within the very concept of blogging that prevent this - there is just so much out there that important contributions can easily be drowned out. These goals are quite neatly summarised and evaluated by Sunstein who concludes that they have not been realised at least to the extent that had been hoped.

In the context of blogging about science, similar hopes are often expressed: some argue that blogging can give individual scientists a voice for their views and opinions and therefore enable them to contribute directly to the national conversations about science and science policy. Related to that, science blogging is often seen as a way for scientists to free themselves from demands of publishers or journalists and others who usually control the flow of information between science and public, so that they can communicate their science directly to the public and allow the public to engage more easily with them. These ideas are also often linked to the free-access movement: Scientists are encouraged to blog directly about their science because ultimately the public pays for it and has a right to know about what science finds. Science blogging does give more people an outlet to write about science - allowing lots of good material to be placed online, though also lots which is less good.

The science bloggers with whom we have discussed our research are also interested in science blogging as offering opportunities for activism, engagement and the development of communities. Bloggers are seeking to use science blogging to engage with and challenge the main-stream media and various other actors.


What do you think are the limitations of these hopes?

As has been noted by some of the bloggers in this community, blogs have relatively small audiences compared to many mainstream media outlets. Blogs can also be left communicating with a relatively narrow audience, such as those already highly interested in science (although whether this is a problem is debatable: Racing Post isn't seen as a failure because of its relatively narrow audience). As things stand, we do not see convincing evidence that science blogs offer a replacement for the mainstream media - although they can be a useful supplement, partner and challenge to it (and some of the bloggers in this community would challenge the distinction between blogs and the mainstream media). Talk of the 'dead tree press' etc. seems, in this context, highly premature.

The efficacy of science blogs' activism is also unclear. Bloggers have been involved in some notable successes - for example, the Singh-BCA libel case - and have been able to organise effectively in order to offer strong challenges to much better-resourced opponents. On the other hand, some have questioned whether initiatives such as #scivote have been effective (and there are interesting links here between 'science activism' and people's broader political goals - some people are less than happy about having the Conservatives in government). We tried to intervene ourselves with regards to aspects of BIS's Science: So What? So Everything initiative (see e.g. coverage in Times Higher and a piece on the Times' science blog) but we now have FOIA responses which show how little impact academics and bloggers had with regards to some problematic aspects of the campaign. We are not sure what solutions there might be here.

We should emphasise that there is a fairly high degree of self-reflection in the community we studied and that bloggers are often quite critical themselves about the limitations of certain practices. We would want to avoid judging the successes/failures of this community in relation to overly-utopian hopes largely generated from outside of the community: there have been some notable achievements, although a small community of science bloggers seems unlikely to turn the science media into a 'dead tree press' in the immediate future.


Can you tell us a bit about who the sorts of people who blog about science are, or at least what the backgrounds and motivations of the bloggers you studied are?

We lack the knowledge to answer about people who blog about science generally: this is a large area that we haven't studied in enough depth, and many prominent bloggers are also anonymous. There is generally something of a lack of research on science blogs.

The community we studied has established norms on writing about science which emphasise accuracy, reliance on evidence and 'letting the facts speak for themselves'. In addition, there is a focus on getting things done: science blogging within the community is not just about writing, but also about campaigning on related causes - this activist element may be a distinguishing feature of this community of science bloggers. There is also an interesting approach to ideas of authority here: ideas of individual authority are largely rejected, but writing instead takes on a
kind of authority through being embedded in a network of blogs, comments, links and research.


Sneaky extra question I asked all the bloggers I interviewed: do you have a favourite blog? If so, what is it? (doesn't have to be a science one).

Mindhacks is excellent for its discussion of a broad range of mind/brain/society-related issues, while Jack of Kent's blog has been a very interesting piece of activism and is an excellent explanation of complex legal issues for laypersons. David Campbell's blog has some good, detailed discussion of issues around politics, geography and multimedia (including some excellent essays on new media/social media). It has also been great to see the development of the 'bad science' blogging community and of the blogs associated with it.

UK science blogger interview: Imran Khan

Imran Khan is the Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE), the UK's leading advocate for science and engineering policy. CaSE are supported by members from academia, industry, learned societies, and charities.

Imran himself comes from a background of science communication and policy, having written for the Guardian, New Scientist and World Health Organisation, produced for the BBC and the BMJ, and researched in the House of Commons. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and Imperial College.

As part of its work, CaSE runs The Science Vote blog. It was originally called CaSE Notes, but was renamed and came to prominence during the 2010 General Election, when it had over 10,000 individual readers.

Do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

The blog has a deliberately niche audience and content, focusing solely on science and engineering policy; whether that be funding, education, the role of Government and Parliament, or related issues. As well as CaSE staff, guest bloggers include science policy professionals, politicians, and working scientists and engineers.

The Science Vote exists to help us achieve our aims of being a voice for the science and engineering community, so our intended audience is fairly specific. The issues we cover are fairly geeky; the intricacies of science funding, speculation on which politicians are interested in the importance of science and engineering, and reviews of science policy events, for instance. We also tend to go into a lot of detail in terms of what we write.

That means that you often not only have to care about the issues we write on, but also be fairly au fait with the background in order to engage with the content. We're quite happy with that model, particularly as it lets us bring in extremely well-informed guest bloggers who don't necessarily have journalistic tendencies.

The S Word blog at NewScientist.com does a brilliant job of exposing the big issues in science policy to a wider scientific audience, and obviously I contribute to that when I can. In comparison, The Science Vote is designed to be a resource for the science policy community and a tool for CaSE, rather than a clarion call.


Do you think there is an increasing appetite for coverage of policy issues in the science blogosphere?

Our readership definitely shot up during the election. Since then, it's dropped off, but is still far higher than anything we had before.

I think all the activity - everything from real-world science hustings to #scivote tweets - got people to twig that that you can't take science and engineering out of politics, or vice versa. If you do, we'll just get sidelined.

So now you have people who were already active in the science blogosphere extending their interest to science policy, because they're passionate about science and therefore recognise the importance of decent science policy.

And it's encouraging that activity levels now are fairly high. Before the election you had a fairly characterful set of Science spokesmen for the three big parties, and you also had the looming election, so science policy was bound to get a lot of attention.

Whereas now it looks like the Lib Dems won't have a formal science spokesman, and Labour don't have theirs yet. But in autumn we'll learn what the science budget will look like, as well as who Willetts' Labour shadow will be, so I'd imagine you'll see even more of an appetite later in the year.


Are there people or institutions in science policy you'd like to see start a blog? (and/ or topics you think should be covered more?)

I think it'd be very interesting to see a blog which takes a close look at the use and misuse of science in politics. Some debate in Parliament is excellent. But some of it is frighteningly bad, particularly when it betrays a lack of some very basic understanding of the nature of evidence. But I think you'd need to be fairly closely linked to Parliament to be able to keep an eye on what's going on there.

One of the subjects which our blog tries to raise the profile of is diversity in STEM. It's an appalling statistic that only one in ten engineering graduates are women, and we have similar problems with socio-economic and ethnic diversity. I think most of us would agree that there's a 'universality' about science that means it can bridge divides, but in many respects we're failing to. Though I'm not sure a dedicated 'diversity blog' is what I'm arguing for; diversity in STEM shouldn't be a balkanised issue, but one which you can weave into different aspects of science policy.


Finally, back to that #scivote hashtag. In terms of political campaigning around science, do you think microblogging (i.e. twitter) is more important than standard blogging, or that they play different/ supporting roles?

There's always a danger when you do anything via twitter that you think "Great, that's ticked off then", forgetting you're only dealing with a subset of the community. And although tweeting is useful in getting the word out and discussion, you can't really do policy analysis and argument in 140 characters. So you do need the standard blogging to underpin it.


Sneaky extra question: can you tell us your favourite blog(s)?

My favourite blogs are badscience, the S word, SciDevNet, engadget, mindhacks, kottke.org, cynical-c, and strange maps. Plus a special mention for the Little Atoms podcast, even though it's not a blog.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

See also my list of (UK) science policy blogs on posterous.

UK science blogger interview: Mun Keat Looi

Mun-Keat Looi is a Science Writer at the Wellcome Trust and one of the editors of the Trust's blog. The Wellcome Trust blog aims to tell some of the many stories about the wide variety of people, projects and events that the Trust funds. Everything and everybody from new PhD students to senior scientists, genetics to the impact of the environment on health, science, art, history, museums plays and films.

Do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

Audience for us is a difficult one because we have so many! Our core audience is the people we fund (or are interested in obtaining funding from us), but even that can include artists, writers and filmmakers as well as scientists of different disciplines. Part of what we want to do is introduce people to the other things we fund, outside of their own fields, be it neuroscientists to genetics or sculptors to biochemistry. As a science writer I hope I write in a way that is interesting and accessible to any general reader, and this is something we try to reflect in the blog. Anybody from any background could be reading our posts, so we try not to assume any prior knowledge and just try to convey why we think something is interesting.


Do you have a favourite blogpost ? (as in one you've really enjoyed writing)

I have a few favourites -- it's hard to pick one as we have so many different kinds of posts. Some of them are more like feature articles, talking about things that just wouldn't fit anywhere else in our communications output. For example, I used 'overmatter' from a feature I wrote about synthetic biology to post about what it is like for students to be in the iGEM competition at MIT. That's proved reasonably popular, and I'd like to think it's been of use to people thinking about taking part in the competition.

On the more conventional side, I like the chance to cover some of the brilliant, if less newsworthy, papers from scientists that the Trust funds (those that aren't deemed 'worthy' enough for a press release or full news story). Some of the smaller studies we fund overseas, for example, or genetics studies that aren't headline-making. It's also nice to cover a paper in more depth than in the media -- I wrote one post about cognitive enhancing drugs that the researcher seemed pleased with. She felt the media coverage had distorted her findings and was relieved to have the chance to set the record straight.

Maybe my favourite post is nothing to do with science though. I like being more personal in blogging than in news or feature writing and I've written a few like this for the Wellcome Collection blog. Specifically a few from a China Symposium we ran, which I attended with my Dad and which very much influenced how I reported it afterwards! Blogging's allowed me to cover things and talk to people I wouldn't normally have had a chance to, which is
one of the reasons I value having the blogs as an outlet.

• The student synbio experience
• RSV vaccine
• Genetics with a bite
• Smart drugs smarter students
• China and me

How do you feel blogging for an institution differs from independent or journalistic blogging?

Obviously you have to be a bit more careful about what you say - you're speaking on behalf of an organisation rather than yourself. Having said that, we have deliberately made the Trust blog a community one with 'real' people behind the posts rather than the anonymous news stories we have on our corporate site (and to some extent Twitter/Facebook). We wanted to put more of a personal face to the Trust as opposed to this big amorphous organisation (or hiding behind pictures of dear old Sir Henry Wellcome...).

In terms of what we do, our approach doesn't differ too much from the way a journalist or blogger might approach a story. All of the writers at the Trust have the same objective: to seek out interesting stories and report as objectively as possible (while being transparent about who we work for).

Where the affiliation pays off is, of course, access to many events, meetings, information and people that others may not have. By virtue of being at the Wellcome Trust there's tons of stuff going on that we have access to and could share with others interested in the same things.

Obviously we want to raise awareness of what the Trust does, but we're not the marketing team or the press office (though they do occasionally contribute). I think the way to raise awareness is to let the content (i.e. the people and projects we fund) speak for itself -- find interesting people and interesting stories and don't bang on about yourself all the time. We're lucky in that we've got a reasonable amount of license to say what we want on what we find interesting, so long as we stay sensible and relevant to the Trust's interests.


Do you feel you differ from blogs from corporate a institution? (or sponsored blogs for that matter?)

I've pondered a lot on how the blogging we do is similar or different to other 'corporate' blogs and other charities' blogs like CRUK, who have a more defined audience. The recent ScienceBlogs Pepsigate scandal raised a lot of questions. As many have said, it may have been different if PepsiCo were upfront about it being marketing from the start, or started a blog genuinely exploring the food science behind their products from a more independent perspective. Institution blogging is an interesting area and I hope to hear more people's thoughts on this at the event.


Finally, care to share your favourite blogs?

Not Exactly Rocket Science, Genetic Future, Cancer Research UK Science Blog, Times Science Blog (before the paywall), Wellcome Library Blog, Alice Bell (no, really*)

As for a non-science blog, it's Kirainet, which is one of several places I go to for amusing/ interesting/ geeky/ weirdo Japanese stuff. A good example of a blog which is pretty straightforward in terms of writing, but the content is so interesting it pretty much speaks for itself. I'd mention others, but am slightly afraid of giving away how much of a dork I really am....


* I paid him to say this.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

UK science blogger interview: Daniel MacArthur

After completing his PhD in 2008 in Australia, Daniel moved to the UK to take up a position at the Sanger Institute, the largest genomics research institute in the country. His day job revolves around the analysis of DNA sequence data from projects like the 1000 Genomes Project, and figuring out ways of using these torrents of data to help inform studies of human disease. His blog Genetic Future focuses on the personal genomics industry: companies offering to sell you information about your own genome, for purposes ranging from learning about your ancestors to predicting your risk of serious diseases.

First question: Do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

This is something that has really evolved over time as I started to get to know my readers. Initially I had a very vague idea of potential readers - basically anyone interested in genetics, I suppose - but I found it very hard to write about the things I was interested in without implicitly requiring some kind of background knowledge from the reader. I also started to accumulate a great group of regular commenters with expertise in the field, a combination of self-educated genetic hobbyists and people with more formal training, and that's the level that I ended up pitching most of my posts.

I'm never sure if I've found the right balance, but it's certainly made it easier for me to write about the scientific and commercial aspects of genomics to not have to build in a huge amount of introductory material for every post.


Is there anything about your composition style, or choice of subject matter which you feel has changed over time? (as you have got to know your readers, or for other reasons).

Yes, absolutely. When I started the blog I initially focused on genetics more broadly, with an emphasis on the scientific issues. As time has gone on I've focused more and more on the commercial side of things, spending a lot of time discussing companies involved in direct-to-consumer genetic testing and DNA sequencing. To some extent this shift has been reader-driven, but mostly it's just a reflection of how my own interests have changed over the last couple of years.


Changing track a bit. You've written about some of the difficulties of scientists (live) blogging conferences. Do you feel there is a role for blogging in opening up business as well as science? Equally, do you feel especially constrained ever as a science blogger who focuses on commercial issues?

There's definitely a role for scientifically-literate bloggers in opening up the commercial world to public scrutiny. One scathing post from a blogger laying out the deficiencies of a company's genetic test can end up dominating Google search hits for that company's name, which then means potential consumers doing even the most superficial web research before buying can quickly get access to informed criticism. That's incredibly important in a field as complex as genetic testing, where most consumers aren't really in a position to make a fully informed decision - having independent, expert reviews out there on the internet can make it a lot easier for people to make the right choice.

That said, with power comes consequences. It's easy to forget that what you say as a blogger can have a major impact on the companies you write about: one bad review of a new sequencing technology could sometimes be enough to dissuade a key investor from buying in, for example. When that sort of money is at stake the consequences of mis-reporting are pretty serious, so I'm now always quite careful to make sure what I say about a company is carefully-phrased and well-justified. I don't always get that right when I'm writing in a hurry or if I'm particularly outraged by a dodgy product, but I try.


Can you imagine more corporate-based science blogging, in similar ways science charities like Cancer Research UK or the Wellcome Trust blog? (esp. the former, as their news blog works to act against google results of "bad" health news messages they would like to combat?)

There are already some quality corporate science blogs out there - a particularly good example in my field is The Spittoon, run by direct-to-consumer genetic testing company 23andMe. However, it's hard for corporate blogs to stay on-message without either being boring or looking like PR shills for their company. I'd definitely like to see more companies out there blogging, but if they do so they're going to have to learn to give their bloggers a reasonably long leash and be prepared to deal openly with controversy in the comments section. It's tough to get the balance right, but companies that do it well can get a lot of respect (and business) as a result; unfortunately, companies that get it wrong (as Pepsico did this week) can find themselves in a world of pain!


Finally, can you tell us your favourite blog? (it doesn't have to be a science blog)

I'm a nerd, so all of my favourite blogs are science blogs! It's very tough to pick a single winner, so I'll name three instead: for general science I'd have to say Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science, for my field of research I think John Hawks' excellent palaeoanthropology blog, and for personal genomics I have only good things to say about the Genomics Law Report.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

UK science blogger interview: Jennifer Rohn

Jennifer Rohn is a cell biologist at University College London. In her spare time, she is also a novelist, freelance science writer and communicator, broadcaster, sci-lit-art pundit and editor of the science-culture webzine LabLit.com. She has blogged at Mind The Gap on Nature Network since 2007. Jenny leaves reporting of the facts and figures of scientific research in the capable hands of her science blogger colleagues. Instead, she prefers to focus on issues of the scientific profession, using her blog to reveal what her day-to-day life in the lab is like – the good, the bad and the ugly.

So, starter question, do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog?

Because I am writing about my life as a scientist, I try to pitch it so that anyone can understand it. I am sure that a large portion of my audience currently consists of fellow scientists, given the Nature Network environment, but I do hope that as my blog becomes more well known, I will reach beyond that inner circle. On the other hand, it almost doesn’t matter if anyone is listening; I have kept a paper diary since I was a child, and for me blogging is an extension of that. Although I try to write in a way that will please other people, I ultimately do it because I love – and even need – to write for myself.


Can you remember what first inspired you to make the move from personal "paper diary" to blog?

I was actually a very late adopter of the whole Web 2.0 thing. I didn't really consider it until I was approached by Nature Network and asked if I would blog for them. At first, being pretty time-poor, I was against the idea of yet more writing commitments. But the more I thought about it, the more attractive the idea seemed. I do a lot of freelance writing, and one of the most frustrating things about it is, after taking great care to perfect exactly what you want to say, having to see your writing slashed and rearranged by editors and sub-editors, some of whom don't really share your sense of craft or style. It suddenly dawned on me that having a blog, I could be the master of my own literary domain. It was a great feeling of freedom!


You mentioned the "inner circle" of Nature Network. (a) What do you feel are the advantages of that community of readers/ other bloggers? (b) Do you have any ideas/ plans for ways other audiences might come to your blog?

I think the only way that the social internet is made bearable is by its propensity to consolidate into small communities; much like a real flesh-and-blood conference, beyond a critical mass of participants it all gets unwieldy and impersonal. It doesn't matter to me how many readers read my blog -- the more the merrier -- but when it comes to direct interactions, I would be much happier interacting with a close-knit group of a few dozen regular commenters rather than hundreds. The more comments a blog attracts, the higher it seems the chances of getting nasty. But if you have come to know your community, people behave much more like they would face-to-face: that is, with the normal codes of courtesy. Also, I like to respond to all comments personally, and if there were too many people it would be impossible.

I would like my blog to be more widely read, though. Recently there have been a few blogs that have touched a nerve and spread via Twitter -- my organization of "Spoof Simon Jenkins Monday", for example -- and this has really increased traffic my way, exposing my blog to people who wouldn't normally come across it. So Twitter has become an excellent way to amplify any important messages my blog may be sending out.


Do you think your experience as a blogger has had an impact on your approach to other writing?

Blogging has definitely honed my style. I've written a lot of fiction, and I've written a lot of science news, and blogging is somewhere in the middle: like news reporting, you need to capture your audience quickly and to be very brief (I really think a good blog post shouldn't be longer than 300-400 words), but like fiction, you want to express something elusive and emotional in the most original way you can. Blogging has helped me to experiment more with humor, which I find has helped with certain scenes I've been working on in my third novel. Above all, blogging has really exercised the basic craft: I can now knock off a fairly polished blog post in under fifteen minutes, and I find that writing everything else has also sped up accordingly. It's almost as if that part of my brain is just permanently primed and ready for action.


Finally, can you tell us your favourite blog?

My favorite blog is Confessions of a (former) lab rat, because it's got a righteous anger and rebellious edge that I wish I could muster. I'm always a little afraid of causing offence, but Confessions never shies away from being controversial or -- when the need arises -- even a bit rude.


This is one of a series of four interviews with UK-based science bloggers. You can find links to all the interviews (and more) here.

Interviews with science bloggers

On the run up to the science blogging event I'm chairing on Thursday, I thought I'd do a series of short interviews with four UK science bloggers who, in addition to our panel, reflect some key areas in the UK science blogosphere.

I've started off with the same question to all of them: do you have a specific audience (or set of audiences) in mind when you blog? Subsequent questions then flow from that answer and/ or the specific type of blogging they do. I've also asked each of them to share their favourite blogs.

I'll make their names into links when the interviews go live:

• Jennifer Rohn, who keeps a "life in the lab" blog on Nature Network.
• Daniel MacArthur, who blogs about the genetic testing industry on ScienceBlogs.
• Mun Keat Looi, who writes on an institutional blog for the Wellcome Trust.
• Imran Khan, who blogs about UK science policy as Director of the Campaign for Science and Engineering.

Additionally, I asked social scientists Hauke Riesch and Jon Mendel to tell me a bit about their research into the science blogging community.

If you're interesting in this sort of thing, I can also recommend this set of mini-interviews with psychology bloggers from British Psychological Society's Research Digest blog. Also, a couple of recent science-related profiles from Normblog: Gimpy and Jack of Kent.

We released a few more tickets for the blogging event, so if you thought we'd sold out, there is still a chance to sign up.

UK Science Blogging "Talkfest"

Beck Smith of the Biochemistry Society and I would like to invite you to our Science Blogging Talkfest, Charles Darwin House, WC1N, 15th July. Registration is free, and online.

We'll start at 6pm with drinks, chat and cake over registration. From 7-8:30pm, we'll move into the lecture theatre for the debate. Then I thought we might go to the pub.

As several people have already pointed out, our panel is entirely made up of bloggers: Petra Boynton, Jon Butterworth, Mark Henderson, Alok Jha, Andy Lewis, Ed Yong. This is something we're actually quite proud of.

I've noticed that a lot of debates around this issue have got stuck in questions of blogging vs "traditional" journalism, which missed out on the chance to talk about blogging as something real, something that is happening (has been happening for a while) and is both exciting and problematic in its right. This isn't necessarily a big old love-in, it is a chance to grow. Neither is this to say that blogging vs. journalism isn't a debate still worth having. You go off and have it if you're interested. We want to talk about blogging. And we have cake.

Maybe we are "limiting" the scope of the debate slightly by framing it with a panel of bloggers. But there is only a limited amount of things any group of people can say in a few hours. I quite strongly believe that far from stifling a debate on blogging, this focus will encourage something more meaningful.

As Alok Jha tweeted: the strength of the project is that there'll be no time wasted on definitions, more sharing of constructive ideas. I also happen to think there are a host of in-fights, debates, differences, mis-understandings and discontinuities within science blogosphere which get glossed over when it is put in a position where it has to defend itself.

We'll be asking the audience for questions on the day, but I'd really like hear some in advance too. Please put them in the comments below (or email me). I should also stress that we want audience members to comment on questions, and answer them too. This isn't going to be an event where we all sit waiting for the panellists to impart their great wisdom, I'm planning on drawing on the knowledge and ideas of the audience too.

You can reserve a place here. Do come, and let me know any questions in advance.

Should science engage?

Gregory and Miller start their 1998 introduction to Science Communication, Science in Public, with the "new commandment from on high: Thou shalt communicate". Twelve years on, we might re-articulate this as "Thou shalt engage" but Gregory and Miller's tongue in cheek questioning of an enterprise we generally assume is A Good Thing is worth retaining. This is not to say public engagement with science and technology (PEST) is a bad thing, just that it's a big topic and worth thinking about what we mean before we blithely go about doing it. I also wonder if recent events, such as climate-gate or the economic downturn, have changed our attitudes to science communication policy in the UK.

I was prompted to ask this at the Science Communication Conference last week. Specifically, I was struck by the difference between Jacquie Burgess' talk, and a similar one she gave at the first of these conferences, back in 2002. I wrote a report on the event for CoPUS, and still remember her presentation in 2002 quite vividly (pdf here).

In 2002, Burgess was a Professor in the Geography Department at UCL, a world expert on the environment and society, she spoke calmly, authoritatively and with a refreshing amount of cynicism. She complained that the results of so many public consultations end up left sitting on a desk somewhere, that she (and moreover, the public stakeholders) were fed up with being involved in processes which go nowhere. Engagement sometimes feels like a lot of talk with little outcomes. She also said this:

“in the rather touchy-feely overcrowded field of public participation there are few processes that genuinely seek arguments”.

I remember feeling inspired by that statement, and it is one that has stayed with me. I am not sure it works in all contexts, sometimes a bit of agreement is better than an argumentative stance. Still, there is a place for a bit of a friendly squabble too.

At the 2010 event, Burgess is still a world authority on the environment and society, now Professor of Environmental Risk at the UEA. But she looked scared, quiet and nervous. Haunted almost. It could just have been the bad lighting at in the lecture theatre, but her whole message was different. She complained about the emotive state of public debate over climate change, especially in the blogosphere, which she likened to play-ground bullying (the mainstream press were criticised too though). Most surprisingly for me, she suggested that climate science, or at least parts of it, should lay low for a bit. They shouldn't engage with the deniers (or "agnostics", or anyone), but hide out for a while, keep out of sight until everything had calmed down. Even when the time had come for engagement, she suggested it might be best to avoid the internet, and instead spend time re-engaging with nature (she mentioned the Eden Project, Tim Smit had just addressed the conference). No actively seeking arguments now, it was positively "touchy-feely".

A fair few people rolled their eyes at some of Burgess' points, but I doubt they came from anything other than thoughtful reflection. I wouldn't I agree with a distinction between internet and engagement with the natural environment. I'm drafting this on my laptop sitting in Gordon Square; if Wellcome's wifi signal stretched this far, I'd use the web to check what type of flower is growing next to me. (NB: I very much doubt Professor Burgess applies naive nature/ culture/ technology divisions). Still, the UEA and it's "climategate" is, perhaps, a special case. Maybe laying low for a bit is wise. Or, maybe because it's such a special case there is even more reason to find a way to engage with various publics (argumentatively or otherwise). I don't know. It is worth thinking about though.

To add a couple of other lines of caution over the worth of engagement, a lot of PEST work could be critiqued in the same way we criticise more old fashioned "top-down" science communication, that it acts to keep the public in their place. It may explicitly exist to connect people, but its very existence only acts to emphasise their differences. This in itself isn't necessarily a worry, scientists and non-scientists are, afterall, different cultural groups. A more pressing concern perhaps, especially when the results of dialogue projects just end up on desks, that they act simply as a form of rhetorical hand-wave toward public participation. I was interested to read in the news this week that Brian Wynne had resigned from the steering committee of a government-commissioned public dialogue on GM Food, complaining it was little more than propaganda for the food industry. Perhaps the PEST project is just a way of making the public feel like they've done something so they don't bother politicians by seeking out real social change. I should note that a colleague of mine, Sarah Davies, has written persuasively about what she calls "non-policy dialogue" in sites like the Dana Center. Again, I don't know but I think the more cynical questions are at least worth asking.

There is also the very simple question of whether scientists are better off working on the science. Either leave science communication to the professionals, or perhaps simply don't bother, if the public don't want to talk or listen to scientists, why poke at them to "engage"? Perhaps we could all use our energies more efficiently. Recently, in a blogpost reacting to Martin Rees' first Reith Lecture, Micheal Brooks suggested that the Royal Society should shift their emphasis from public communication and towards politics: forget fellowship placements for scientists to spend time working in media outlets, embed them in Whitehall instead. Young scientists should gain experience of politics and think about developing careers and influence there. I'm not sure I agree with the either/ or distinction here (in fact I disagree quite strongly) but it is an interesting point, and it is worth noting that the Economics and Social Research Council is very active in this area.

I have no answer to the question of whether engagement is a good idea or not. I suspect there are many different answers for many different contexts. I'd be interested to know what other people think. Have experiences of climategate or years of not-much-actual-action on PEST projects caused UK science communication to start to turn its back on the enterprise? If not, then at least are there times and places where/when science shouldn't engage, and what are they?

Can science communication teach the rest of the academy?

I've just given a talk about science communication at an event on public engagement with arts, humanities and social science research.

Although I hoped all the time, money, anxiety and analysis poured into science communication over the last 25 years (250 years...) would mean I'd have something useful to say, I was a bit unsure about it. It's arrogant to assume science communication can tell the rest of the academy how to go about sharing it's research. There are huge differences between communicating the natural sciences and communicating other research areas. For one thing, we shouldn't discount the huge amount of money, professional expertise and institutional support provided by the now huge science communication industry. The standard sociology post-doc just wouldn't have those sort of support systems.

That said, there are similarities too, and I believe there is potentially a lot science communication can learn from attempts to communicate other subjects. For example, Farida Vis' reflections on being trolled by racist online groups has, I think, lots of interesting things to say to those caught up in climategate (Vis' slides are first link here). Also, I say that there are differences between science and everyone else, but it's not as if there aren't huge differences within this big old thing we call science. Epigenetics has a completely different public cultural context to high energy physics. Communicating one synbio project to one audience will be very different from another, to another.

Anyway, it was a difficult gig, so I did the sensible thing and chickened out by getting other people talk for me. Firstly I showed this video by some of my MSc students, which juxtaposes four scientists' ideas about their relationships with the public: one from 1950, one from 1970, another from 1990 and finally, a 2010 point of view.

Debate on science and society from Cecilia Rosen on Vimeo

In particular, I wanted to draw out the difference between the 1990 character's approach and that of 2010: the shift away from talking down to the public and towards a more discursive, interactive and contextual approach: from "deficit model" to "dialogue" to use the sci-com jargon.

There are loads of problems with the 1990 "deficit model" stance, if you really care there are many books and papers summarising them (or this report provides a good overview). Most of the criticisms stressed how simplistic it is to black-box "science" and "the public", and that media audiences tend to contextualise information given to them, sometimes in unpredictable ways. It's often said that the only word in "Public Understanding of Science" anyone could agree on was "of" (and even that had its discontents). Some people objected to the hierarchical set up of the models, which assumed science sits on the top, passing down information to the laity. It was also argued that it doesn't do the advancement of knowledge much good to rely only on scientists: there are useful things to be learned from talking to people without advanced degrees. None of this is to suggest that the public know better than science, just that listening to the occasional outside voice can be useful. To argue against a top-down model isn't necessarily to argue for a singularly bottom-up one (though some people might). If nothing else, going around acting as if your audience are stupid is bad PR. Having a conversation with someone where you build mutual trust, respect and understanding (even if you do not always agree) is, quite simply, more likely to get your voice heard.

However, in showing this video I also wanted to emphasise the way my clever MSc students put the 1950, 1970, 1990 and 2010 attitudes together, making the characters fight it out across-generations. Science communication often likes to pat itself on the shoulder that it's left the problems of the top-down model behind. It hasn't, despite the rhetoric of engagement and dialogue and involvement (and using "deficit model" like it's an insult). More importantly, moving to a more interactive model doesn't solve all our problems, if anything it just creates new ones. There are also several points the older characters make which are still worth listening to. None of this is simple.

I then talked briefly about four science communication projects I thought were worth noting: Colliding Particles, a series of short films exploring the "human stories" of scientists working on the the LHC; Galaxy Zoo, possibly the world's most successful citizen science project; Opal, which uses "community embedded scientists" in a range of interesting ways which both makes and communicates ecology at the same time; and "I'm a Scientist", a dialogue web event which pitches teenagers' questions to scientists. I finished by handing over to Jenny Joplin who works in events at the Wellcome Collection (a fifth science communication project of note). None of these are perfect and you can't necessarily apply their approaches outside of their own specific contexts, but they are all well thought out, successful and (I think) worth a look at.

The twitter tag was #enres if you want to hear what others think/ said at the event, and further blogs/ comments may well crop up on their website.

The "booms" of 20th C popular science

Just before Easter, I co-ran a small conference entitled Science Communication in the 20th Century: The “Booms” of Popular Science Publishing. I almost don't need to blog about, as Scott Keir's already done such a thoughtful (and bloody funny) job over at Nature Network. You can also read a short piece by me posted last week, inspired by a slide used in one of the talks (of a 1958 girls chemistry set). Still, I thought it was worth typing up some notes, and I could provide a link to a googledoc of the abstracts for anyone who's interested.

In stumbling around for some sort of theme for an academic(ish) event on popular science, my co-organiser, Dr Hauke Riesch, and I (after much debate) settled first on the 20th century, then more specifically on that century's so-called "booms" of pop sci publishing. The initial idea was to to devote the morning to discussions of early 20th C popularisations of relativity, with an afternoon on more recent "Hawkin/ Dawkins" matters. However, our call for papers tended seemed to attract papers emphasising other trends or moments in popular science. Perhaps this says something about how important these apparently high profile booms really were, or maybe researchers are just bored by them by now.

I wanted to keep our definition of "popular science" reasonably loose, to include a range of media, but Hauke was adamant "popular science" means books. In the end we compromised with the word "publishing". As the papers presented at the conference demonstrated very neatly, however, you can publish all sorts of things, and publishing about one medium often gets tangled up in discussion of another. So maybe I got my way after-all (though the previous event did include discussion of songs, I missed the singing). We ended up with a fair bit of discussion of magazines, toys and, via a set of books, blackboards. So, the photo I'm illustrating this post with isn't a big pile of Dawkins and Hawkins. It isn't a dusty pile of early copies of New Scientist either, but a snipped from a 1980s computer magazine.

To move onto the day's content: I'll give some notes on Peter Bowler's plenary, and then say something about the event as a whole. I won't dwell on the papers themselves. You can read more in the abstracts, and google the speakers to see if they'll give you a copy of their paper (i.e. don't bug me for papers, I don't have them). We're looking into publishing a collection of the papers as a special edition of a journal, so the researchers might have a chance to develop their points elsewhere anyway.

Peter Bowler's talk was truly lovely. As Scott's blogpost puts it so nicely, Peter seemed to relish the word boom (which really is a fantastic word). More substantively, I think Peter really got to the heart of the issue. Much of his talk referred to inter-war science magazine publishing which he argued was not nearly as much as a boom area as it was sometimes made out as. Bowler started with the example of Conquest magazine, founded in 1919 under much rhetoric on the demand for public information about science. It was soon absorbed by Discovery though, a much more "top-down" publication, very much organised by the academy (edited by one CP Snow) and ran at a loss. 1929 saw the emergence of Armchair Science, once again under much rhetoric of a new boom in public interest, and once again of limited financial success. He showed us a great slide of its cover, with headlines including "Why eat bad cheese but not bad meat?" "What is noise?" and "Wonders of the night sky". From these studies, Bowler went on to talk more broadly about where the booms are imagined to stem from suggesting it was, in some respects, double-sided. There is a rhetoric of a public-led boom (i.e. fulfilling a desire from potential readership) and also a science-led one (i.e. suggesting the 'inspirational power' of a particular scientific idea, person or discovery drives the boom): a sort of conflation of both bottom-up and top-down models of science communication. Peter noted the 'modern synthesis' as a scientific moment which interestingly didn't provoke any sense of publishing boom, maybe because by then anything connected with evolution was seen as 'old hat', or maybe because (as a synthesis) it couldn't be easily tied to a single character like relativity and Einstein. He also reflected on three publishing areas which he thought could be seen as a popular science boom of the interwar period: serials of popular science books, such as Huxley/Well's The Science of Life which was serialised in thirty fortnightly parts; "boys books", highly illustrated pieces celebrating warfare, exploration and wonder largely marketed as prizes and Christmas presents; and self education guides such as the Home University Library, which would were general knowledge guides but often stressed scientific content in their PR.

What then was the key topic of the day? Well probably not booms, despite Bowler's beautiful set up of the topic, the word "booms" was occasionally referred to, but rarely explored in any depth by the papers which had other things to say (this isn't a failing in the papers, and maybe Bowler said it all). The rhetoric and cultural standing of mystery with respects to popular science was, for me, was the most dominant theme, though I'm sure other delegates would disagree.

Pink Chemistry Sets

In case anyone thinks the pink construction set (with sparkles) is a new thing: a chemistry set for girls, 1958 (USA). Or rather, a kit for a wannabe "Lab Technician", because the girl would be just supporting the actual chemist, naturally. Apparently it included a pink microscope. Mother and daughter look terribly happy though, don't they?

Apologies for bad quality photograph, it's of a powerpoint slide. From an event on 20th century popular science I ran yesterday (full blogpost on this forthcoming). The paper was given by Maggie Jack, a History and Philosophy of Science MPhil student at the University of Cambridge, based on the dissertation she wrote as an undergrad at Harvard.

Early/ mid 20th century chemistry sets were marketed quite explicitly for boys and their fathers, as if chemical experimentation was an opportunity for male bonding and general expression of red-blooded manhood. Fear not the explosions, take power over nature, etc, etc. Insert your favourite feminist philosopher of science here. It really wasn't anything subtle: the box covers and advertising for chemistry sets seemed to want to signal BOY, and do so as unequivocally as possible. This isn't just an American trend, Salim Al-Gailani (another HPS Cambridge student) gave a similar paper about UK chemistry sets at the 2007 British Society for the History of Science. It'd be interesting to know if the same was true in non-English speaking countries too.

I'm sure 1950s girls played with the non-pink chemistry sets, however they happened to be presented. Just as girls read Harry Potter, even if his name is bigger than J(oanne)K Rowling. It probably goes without saying that when it comes down to their actual use, gender messages of kids media aren't nearly as simple. In fact, one of the key points Jack wanted to make about Chemistry sets was the way they provided materials for exploratory work; that they allowed play through unintended consequences of science (indeed, they celebrated this), rather than necessarily being a matter of leading kids through a set of pre-ordained educational outcomes. I'm a bit too cynical to necessarily agree with her entirely on this, but it was a worthwhile point. Plus, my expertise on the topic is rather skewed to late 20th/ early 21st century kits: maybe such toys were a lot more exploratory in the past (even if gender identities were not?).

Finally, before we dismiss the pink microscope/ lab technician kit as a funny old 1950s thing, here's an fword post about chemistry kits, written just last year, which brings out some of the gender issues involved in our recent fashion for retro kids' non-fiction (*cough* Dangerous Book for Boys *cough*).

EDIT (15:10): from tip-off via twitter, a pink telescope with a lower power than the boy's model (worth scrolling through the comments on that post).
EDIT (15:25, 2nd April): from various comments I'm getting about this, I just want to underline that I can see how a pink microscope might be seen as something quite empowering, a positive expression of feminine science (now as much as in 1958). Personally, I'm not convinced by this argument, but I don't think we should simply say pink stinks and that's the end of the debate. Gender issues are always complex, in toys and in science perhaps no less so.

Public Service Media in the Digital Age

EDIT (7/4): Videos of the event now up at OpenDemocracy.

I spent the bulk of Thursday at the University of Westminster, learning all about Public Service Media in the Digital Age. A few people asked if I'd liveblog the event on twitter. For various reasons, I decided not to. Instead, this post starts and ends with a few tweet-ish points and gets a bit more reflective/ descriptive in the middle. It's reasonably long. Have a scroll down and see if anything catches your eye.

The photo is from a lunchtime activity, where we were asked to reflect on the issues involved through Lego. It's a link to flickr: click on it if you want more notes.


10:20. Wow the main building at the University of Westminster is GORGEOUS, I'd forgotten it's the old Royal Polytechnic Institution.

10:30. Not even started yet, and I'm already finding myself pulled into an argument on the nature of expertise (re: swine flu).

David Gauntlett kicked off by drawing our attention to the difference between the more traditional "public service broadcasting" and the "public service media" of their title, suggesting the shift from one to the other reflected a shift to a broader media landscape, and one that was possibly more interactive. A notion of "public service", perhaps denotes a rather Reithian "top-down" style of media. David suggested that in the digital age, perhaps public service media institutions should be providing platforms rather than content. There are corners of Youtube which are, arguably, more "public service" than the bulk of BBC or Channel Four output. Yet, YouTube runs at a humongous loss. Maybe the solution then would be a BBC-Tube, or a British-Library-Tube? I'm inclined to think the very idea of a BBC-Tube boarders on tautology, but the explicit contradiction of such an idea is also what makes it a powerful point.

Appropriately enough, next up was Richard Deverell from the BBC. He underlined the shift in language, noting that the new "Media City" (Salford) reflects a more open and interactive media landscape than "Broadcasting House" or "Television Centre". He provided a nice anecdote about writing a report in 1995 for John Birt on "the information superhighway". Birt promptly flew to the US, spent three days chatting in Bill Gates' garden and came back a zealot for "online". He also provided a neat analogy for the difference between on-demand and "linear" broadcasting: it's like a supermarket saying you can only buy chocolate digestives at 7pm on a Thursday. He finished with a seven point manifesto for media in the digital age. Some highlights of which were: embrace the technology and technologists because software engineers are the new creatives; be as audience focused as possible (including loads of audience research); and do less, but do it better (including exploiting the archive).

Someone asked if Deverell felt there was a tension between "quality" and an uptake of user-generated content; that he worried about losing the BBC's editorial control? The answer was simple: yes, a huge tension. This is why he felt there will never be a BBC-Tube, but it's a tension we have to deal with. Another interesting question focused on news: one of the features of the web is that it is a post-modern medium, that it challenges the idea of a single truth narrative, how can you therefore say online news is more impartial? Deverell's answer was that online news could bring more diverse sources (so, he would agree it fractures truth narrative, but maybe provides closer to truth? Gave me flashbacks to reading Karl Popper and/ or Jay David Bolter)

Next was a presentation from William H Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute. This largely presented data on UK internet use trends. You can read more on their website, but it's worth repeating the odd top-line result here. It's thought-provoking if nothing else. (apologies if I've got any of the stats wrong in attempting to transcribe my shockingly bad handwriting).

• 70% of British population is online.
• The internet profile of a rich, old person is strikingly similar to that of a young, poor person.
• 38% of us have met someone online (I was a bit surprised this was so low).
• The internet is fast becoming the first place we go to for information. In 2005, 38% of people would go to the internet first for medical/ health information. In 2007, this was 68%.
  
• We trust the internet. We trust it as much as broadcast media, and less than newspapers.
  
• Our trust in the internet is increasing whilst our trust in the government is decreasing. At the same time we are more inclined to want the government to regulate the internet (people are inconsistent shocker).
  
• People who use the internet are more sociable than people who do not.
  
• We think we are getting better at searches, but actually the search engines are getting cleverer (which includes cleverer at sending us to brands, though this might be seen as a good thing if the brand is the BMJ or NHS).
• When we find information online, we go via search engines or social media.
  

On that final point, Dutton also noted that we don't go to a "place" anymore, as much as we seek out specific content. We are less likely to hang out at the Guardian, FT, BBC, or Times. Rather, we seek out a story and end up at one of them. This reflects the oft-repeated line that homepages are pretty redundant these days (really, when was the last time you went to the BBC homepage?) and a point made by Deverell; that it is the low-cost of searches which have allowed us all to become media producers in the digital age. This was challenged by the floor though, as it was pointed out that we often google specific places, if only because it's as quick/ quicker than sorting through personal bookmarks. (I can't be the only one who googles themself every time they are asked for their work phone number?). I also asked about how he thought about the "digital divide", and if he had any demographics on who comments and contributes online. If all the "public media" benefits of the digital age are to be found in user-generated content, surely this is, at least, a secondary form of a digital divide? Dutton pointed me to their research papers online for more information, but couldn't provide much detail there and then.

Finally, there was a short presentation from Jude England, Head of Social Science at the British Library. She talked quite broadly about the ways in which the British Library was trying to deal with digital. She painted a picture of the library as an institution still quite stuck to an idea of collecting for future generations (rather than necessarily being used, today). Although they are opening up the collections a lot more now, on the whole, you do still need to visit the building. She made some fascinating points about the issues involved in collecting digital culture. For example, the library asks permission to archive blogs, and so generally will only get 25% of the ones they want (you have to sign a form saying you own the copyright for all the content, you can see bloggers jumping at that). She emphasised how important the collecting of digital culture is: what's going to happen to all those pictures of snow people send the BBC?

In questions, I picked up on a point England had made about digital collections perhaps helping improve the "public understanding of research". I suggested that we were perhaps better served buy concepts such as "public engagement" or "public participation" rather than "public understanding" (I know, cliches and jargon at that, but it's my job to say stuff like that). It's all very well using the internet to explain to the public what researchers do and/ or let a larger number of people have access to primary and secondary sources. However, I think one of the great things about people like the BL archiving blogs is that it shows the importance of blogs alongside more traditional forms of publishing. For example, Literary researchers should be paying attention to the sorts of literary criticism done by lit-bloggers and fan-fiction communities. Academics should let themselves be challenged and informed by publics as much as they should do challenging and informing work themselves. In response England made the good (but ever-so-easy) point that the public need to turn up to such engagement work. Still, I'm not sure ideas of "public understanding" should be structuring our thoughts about "public service media", in an digital age, or at any other time.

12:15. Jude England: How Karl Marx managed to get a readers' pass to the British Library, I don't know (Ha! True! It is a good point).

12:45. Do British Library archives reflect the original long tail? (or at least long tail analysis is v. applicable?)

12:55. William Dutton: People used to send hate email on campus in the late 1970s. It's nothing new.

I then missed a chunk of the event after lunch - bunked off for a meeting about curriculum reform. I did catch a bit of the end of this and the panel discussion, and it sounded like it included some really amazing projects. Much more "grass-rooty", at least in contrast to the big brands of the BBC or BL featured in the morning. Look them up: the projects were Dogs Trust, the School of Everything, and the Social Innovation Camp.

15:15. Dan McQuillan: words like "engagement" and "participation" tend to be used as platitudes (I have a lot of sympathy with this...)

15:20. Fascinating example of some women who set up their own peer-to-peer learning project instead of doing MA's in media/ arts (think they are called MzTek)

After coffee, there was a "reflections" panel. First up was Charles Brown, a lecturer in Media Management at Westminster. He started on a deliberately optimistic note: that we are living in the most exciting phase of public service media, that change is good and we should not fear digital technologies. His presentation was mainly about "OTT technologies". I'm not entirely sure what they are, but sound cool. They are OTT because they work "over the top" of content dissemination platforms, his example was largely Project Canvas (a sort of extension of iplayer, outside of just the BBC, see this blogpost from the BBC for some notes). His discussion seemed to center around how well organisations such as Sky, Virgin, Google or the major museums might be able to work alongside the BBC. I thought this raised some interesting points, but I still wondered where more "grassroots" work would stand. Maybe these issues needed to be brought back to the tensions endemic to the idea of a BBC-tube?

Next up was the always interesting Bill Thompson. He put the whole issue in a historical context, taking us back to the early 1920s and the creation of the BBC, when (as he put it) six radio companies started producing media content in order to sell their boxes of technology off the back of. The upshot of this image being the nicely provocative question: do we think of the BBC as a technology company, or media producer? Which made for an interesting reflection of Deverell's contention that the software engineers are the new creatives and, if nothing else, puts the annual complaints about Christmas adverts for digital radio boxes into some perspective. Enacting the rule that the first person to cite Clay Shirky wins, Bill went on to note that "the printing press made monks [seem] slow". Similarly, he suggested, YouTube has made television dull, the internet in general has made public service broadcasting patronising, unappealing and irrelevant.

Bill also highlighted some of the work done by Channel Four, such as diverting budget from daytime educational programming to amazing youth-oriented projects like Smokescreen. With these examples, he also made the point that there are different types and different styles of public service media in a digital age. I really liked this point, and would like to underline that there this relates to different audiences, at different times, for different purposes too. Something I think is especially important in the context of a Channel Four example, considering the aspect of their public service remit which refers to serving diverse and marginal audiences.

Finally, we heard from Roland Harwood, from NESTA/ 100% Open. He started with the warning that public service media wasn't really his area, but that he could talk about the opening up of large organisations, and the ways in which this relates (positively) to innovation. He started off by joking that the web had killed careers first in music industry, then publishing, and so now he was an advocate for "open innovation". This, broadly, is a desire that industries should share the risks and rewards of innovation, that their default should be "open". Moreover, that increasingly there is no escape from open, that innovation industries must be so. He had some nice examples, Mozilla being a classic one, but also some research done into the 25-39 male demographic by the Discovery Channel, which was shared with other brands. He also referred to work between Great Ormond Street Hospital and McLaren F1 pit-stop crews. Some intensive care staff were joking about the similarity between patient handover and what the pit-stop crews do, and then thought they might be able to learn from them (Sun article, if you're interested). I loved this example, though it did strike me that this was more a matter of listening to the expertise within the hospital as much as reaching out (part of why I liked it).

I wanted to pick up on one of the things Harwood said, that "big didn't necessarily mean bad", and link this to Deverell's point that public service media in a digital age should do less, but better. I also wanted to highlight the fact that we'd been talking about "the public" all day rather than "publics" or "audiences" (Again, cliche, I know. Again: my job). I think this is really significant in terms of the digital age opportunities for public service broadcasting: that there is a greater possibility to serve niche markets (in some respects, this is the long tail argument). So I asked the panel if they thought there was a tension between serving everyone high quality content through Big Broadcasting, or people able to serve lots of people ok with cheaper niche content that appeals to more specific interests. Bill made the very fair point that niche content can serve people a lot better than just "ok", even at a low cost. He also emphasised that there will still be moments where we come together (Obama inauguration, anyone) and, I think more importantly, that facebook serves a lot of people in lots of different ways: we don't necessarily have to put broad- and narrow-casting in opposition to each other.

On Big-Bad, Harwood also drew an interesting comparison in terms of the relative possibilities for openness of media companies vs. "Big Pharma". Lots of people can make their own video and put it up against BBC content on YouTube; it's harder to make your own drugs. I thought this was a salient comparison, although it reflects some complex and very controversial issues (google "open source drugs" or slightly less heavyweight reading, there's this Guardian piece on garage genetics).

16:30. From floor: We wouldn't invent the BBC today. Roland Harwood: We wouldn't invent the NHS (but #welovetheNHS). We wouldn't build St Paul's (something in the architectural metaphor...).

16:45. Example of Chinese restaurants as "open franchise" - because they are all roughly the same, but with no central HQ/ brand.

16:55. David flags up Connection Factory website, especially as a space to ask for help and/ or ideas from other members (e.g. this on studying BBC audiences)

All in all, it was a good day. Thanks to Anna and David for organising it. I don't feel I changed my mind about anything big, or learnt a huge amount of detail. But that isn't necessarily a criticism. I thought through some ideas and I met some interesting people. Both of which are important. It was, on reflection, a little like spending the day stuck inside a really geeky episode of Media Talk, or perhaps a media-themed Digital Planet (n.b. in my opinion, that's a good thing).