It seems that Daniel MacArthur and I may be starting to reach some common ground on the issue of tweeting and blogging from conferences. I think we might be able to meet in the middle here, so I've arrived with here for the final showdown.
Figure 1: Dr. Isis, looking fierce.
And for those who might argue that I am mainly trying to generate a buzz and some traffics, or that any use of profanity hurts the cause, I say unto thee, "fuck."
Now, back to the issue at hand. Before I make my demands, Dr. MacArthur, I would like to begin with the following supposition:
I do not attend scientific conferences to interact with the public. What I say to my colleagues is different than how I would want my data provided to the public. My work is not framed for the public. It is framed for colleagues that I might form collaborations with.
With that in mind, allow me to make the following demands:
- I still think that scientists deserve the courtesy of being asked before their unpublished work is blogged or tweeted and that bloggers have to respect the scientist's boundaries. I think that this will go further in establishing a culture of good will between scientists and bloggers. I still worry that a simple icon could be interpreted as carte blanche. As you've already admitted, and admirably so, your expectations of what you thought was acceptable and the reality are different. When stuff like this happens, it doesn't hurt the readership of the blogger. If anything, the opposite. It could, however, hurt the career of the scientist. I think an open dialogue, which many scientists don't feel they have with the media, will go further to establishing a level of comfort with these new technologies than bloggers telling scientists they have to accept this new media and bloggers demanding things of scientists. Scientists don't trust the media. Why? Because we get fucked (oops) by it all the time. If you want things to be different, then you have to engage in open communication.
One of the goals of many bloggers is to bring plentiful information fast. I just cannot see how that benefits my science. Yes, it's great to have the public excited about science and to have them feel involved, but those feelings won't change if you wait 10 minutes to talk to some scientists about what you plan to do. Then, I can forsee a world in which scientists embrace bloggers. In which conferences have special sections for the sole purpose of having work liveblogged, where bloggers are invited specifically to blog some of the hottest scientific findings and can engage and ask questions. The idea of the icon isn't bad, per se, but it is still putting the cart way before the horse and someone, as you've learned, is going to get trampled by that horse.
- I do not like the idea of bloggers hidden amongst my peers, registering under the pretense of engaging in scientific discussion. As I have said, the thing about the media is that they are the elephant in the room. The rules for how they are to conduct themselves are very clear. They wear special name tags and you know exactly who you are talking to. You don't know that about bloggers. They are little wolves in sheep's clothing, disguised as your colleagues. I don't use my real life self to get information and material for my pseudonymous self. This goes back to my rule about not writing about something a colleague shares with me as a peer unless they specifically know that I am writing about them and have approved the release of the information. I appreciate that one of my colleagues might tell my real life scientist self something they wouldn't say if they knew I was going to report what they said back to the public. If someone intends to blog an event and this is allowed by the conference, then their intent needs to be obvious. They need to be obvious. They need to be branded with a big fat scarlet B and it needs to made clear to everyone in the room, not just with an icon that only a particular subset of people will understand, that things said in the context of a presentation are fair game for public disclosure. This includes the questions, and I feel skeevy about that part too. Sometimes people disclose unpublished things about their own work in engaging a speaker. Is that stuff fair game for publication too? My gut tells me "no", but I appreciate not all bloggers would feel that way.
Technology
Information Science
Comments
Hmm, I think there's a misunderstanding (in the original sense) here: You say:
"I do not like the idea of bloggers hidden amongst my peers, registering under the pretense of engaging in scientific discussion."
..and I see a category error. The thing is, you're not a scientist or a blogger or tweeter. And a blogger or tweeter isn't a member of the media (a profession I distrust in the aggregate fully as much as you do).
When a researcher returned from a conference in the early 90's, one of the things they did - were often expected to do, in fact - was to stand up at the next departmental meeting and tell everybody about anything scientifically exciting, interesting or embarrassing they picked up at the conference. Often a dozen or two people but could easily be up to a hundred or so. They'd also call or email their colleagues with a chatty account of the conference if there was anything fun happening.
What your typical blogger or tweeter is doing is the very same thing. Their readers are typically people in their own lab, their immediate colleagues and friends, and of course their mother - all people they'd tell about the meeting anyhow (except for their mother in most - though not all - cases). After all, the number of people actually reaching more than a few dozen people are very few, mostly semi-professional or professional science reporters (like the people blogging at Scienceblogs) and will normally readily self-identify as reporters rather than researchers (they know they have a large impact and adjust accordingly).
The border between public and not-public has become a lot less fuzzy and indistinct, and the right approach is to acknowledge that and adjust to it. If you're presenting something you don't want spread around, then be crystal clear and say so - even better, make sure the conference organizer puts that in writing beforehand. The "just a bit secret" approach is pretty much untenable today.
Posted by: Janne | June 19, 2009 11:09 AM
I am torn on this issue. On the one hand, like Isis, I often present work that isn't quite ready for prime time because (1)I don't know what it means and I'm hoping someone will tell me or (2)I am uncertain how to proceed and I want someone to tell me. Sometimes I have the manuscript ready to submit and I'm presenting to get a "first review" so I can fix things before I send my baby in to the mean peer referees.
In any of these circumstances, I have submitted an abstract to the meeting. An abstract is short and cryptic by nature, but it is still a public record. While my "intended" audience may be a scientific community, anyone in the state of Nebraska can walk into our medical library, pull out the printed record, and begin misinterpreting it. This would include members of the mainstream media.
Of course, the mainstream media is not going to be interested in most of what I am presenting because it is way too basic and "premature" for their needs. They will focus on the same stuff the meeting organizers will provide press releases and conferences on: clinical studies and new risk factor and gene studies.
The biggest danger I see is someone tweets or blogs about my observation that drug X given to mice with diabetes reduces expression of gene Y which has been linked to nephropathy. I haven't said that drug X will prevent nephropathy, but many laypeople will interpret these results in this manner. They may start storming their doctors' offices demanding drug X, and some doctors may comply. If drug X eventually is not effective (or even harmful) then a whole bunch of people are going to be pissed, even though it's their own fault.
In general, I come down on the side that the abstract and it's presentation has become public. No one should be able to photograph your poster or presentation and put it on the internet without your permission, and the speculation that occurs during Q&A could be problematic.
BTW, I grew up in Springfield, MO, and I'm glad to see it mentioned in some context besides the city where Brad Pitt grew up (no, I didn't know him).
Posted by: Pascale | June 19, 2009 11:17 AM
Chatting or e-mailing colleagues is an evanescent communication with a small number of people. Blogging or tweeting is a permanently available communication with everyone in the entire fucking world.
My understanding is that Daniel himself is both an actual scientist and a blogger, and that he registered for the meeting he attended as a researcher active in the field.
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | June 19, 2009 11:18 AM
"My understanding is that Daniel himself is both an actual scientist and a blogger, and that he registered for the meeting he attended as a researcher active in the field."
My point was that the number of scientists who are not both are shrinking, and there is no dissociation between those two roles.
"Blogging or tweeting is a permanently available communication with everyone in the entire fucking world."
Except that the entire sexually active world could not give a fuck. You could blog the solution to the life, universe and everything, and all you'd accumulate after a month is fifty pagehits and twohundred spam comments about how to get your degree at some diploma mill.
Again, most blog posts or tweets - indexed by google or not - will never reach any more people than those departmental meetings do. If you say somethign outrageous enough to have your comments explode online, then those comments would probably had been enough to reach all the wrong people before the net as well.
And once again - if you want to present something you do not actually want to stand up for in public then say so beforehand. Why is that so difficult?
Posted by: Janne | June 19, 2009 11:36 AM
If someone intends to blog an event and this is allowed by the conference, then their intent needs to be obvious. They need to be obvious. They need to be branded with a big fat scarlet B and it needs to made clear to everyone in the room, not just with an icon that only a particular subset of people will understand, that things said in the context of a presentation are fair game for public disclosure.
I'm not seeing the need for this (at least as far as talks go). As a speaker, if you know that a certain level of public dissemination is allowed, what difference does it make to you which person sitting in front of you is actually going to go out and do it? For one-on-one conversations, though, I'd agree that bloggers absolutely should disclose themselves.
Posted by: JSinger | June 19, 2009 12:13 PM
Maybe this is true for your blog, but there are some blogs with quite substantial readership. A far amount of theat readership is the lay public. See Pascale's note above.
Posted by: Isis the Scientist | June 19, 2009 1:34 PM
Again, it's different for computer science. Our conferences are heavily peer-reviewed. I just got a full and final four-page paper accepted at a large conf with an acceptance rate of 60%. Most researchers in the field put their papers up on their web page, and these publications count. This is very unlike the situation you describe, where work in progress is presented.
Posted by: Perceval | June 19, 2009 2:23 PM
Let me quote myself in the first post:
"After all, the number of people actually reaching more than a few dozen people are very few, mostly semi-professional or professional science reporters (like the people blogging at Scienceblogs) and will normally readily self-identify as reporters rather than researchers (they know they have a large impact and adjust accordingly)."
Not just my blog - the vast majority of blogs have no readership outside the bloggers own circle or people. Nobody outside that circle is going to pick up a tweet about a research result, for the same reason nobody outside picks up a tweet about having washed their cat - nobody unrelated cares.
Just tell your audience this is off the record and it'll be fine.
Posted by: Janne | June 19, 2009 8:27 PM
Isis,
Yep, looks like we've pretty much reached agreement on the substantive issues; I noted previously that I have no problem with bloggers formally registering as such, and even having some special indicator added to their name-tags. I'm also all for encouraging bloggers to engage actively with the researchers whose work they discuss, where that's possible, and I've had some discussions with others about the possibility of drawing up some kind of blogger code of conduct that conference organisers could adopt that spells out acceptable behaviour.
However, I'm also hopeful that at least some conferences will declare themselves a free-fire zone for blogging unless speakers specifically request otherwise. I think such conferences will prove much more successful in disseminating presented ideas to a broader audience. They may well discourage the presentation of very early-stage research or "scoopable" data, but I suspect this wouldn't have much of an effect on the majority of presented work.
There's a thread running through your post that seriously grates with me, though, because it suggests that you see the categories of "blogger" and "scientist" as discrete entities in a conference setting. For instance:
When stuff like this happens, it doesn't hurt the readership of the blogger. If anything, the opposite. It could, however, hurt the career of the scientist.
But all of the bloggers in the audience are also scientists, and if they damage another scientist's career this can have a fairly dramatic effect on their own reputation in the scientific community. We don't all place a desire for blog readership above our scientific career; at least in my case, the efforts are complementary. I'm not going to screw another scientist over to get myself a couple of thousand page views.
Then there's this:
I do not like the idea of bloggers hidden amongst my peers, registering under the pretense of engaging in scientific discussion. [...] They are little wolves in sheep's clothing, disguised as your colleagues.
There's no pretense involved. We register for conferences for exactly the same reasons as other attendees, and for many of us blogging is scientific discussion. The majority of my regular readers (or at least commenters) are scientists or people working in genetics-related fields, and a sizeable proportion of the researchers I talk to at conferences already know me as a blogger (certainly more than know me as a scientist!).
Perhaps the notion of bloggers "hiding" in the audience comes more easily to someone who blogs pseudonymously, but a lot of us wear both of our identities in the open - and the implication that those of us who hadn't yet been "branded with a big red B" were somehow being deliberately surreptitious in our coverage ("pretense", "wolves in sheep's clothing") is frankly insulting.
Apart from that one sore point, I appreciate you taking the time to spell out your views, and I'm glad we could largely reach agreement on the important issues.
Posted by: Daniel MacArthur | June 19, 2009 8:42 PM
OT: CPP, is there something wrong with you? I've noticed, on this blog and elsewhere that you no longer curse and actually have some important things to say. Keep up the good work.
Posted by: Danimal | June 19, 2009 9:10 PM
Fuck you, asshole. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
Posted by: Comrade PhysioProf | June 19, 2009 9:50 PM
What about scientists who blog in order to blow wide open the character assassination, nepotism, back-room dealing, and other non-transparent, unscientific activity that takes place at conferences?
Posted by: Lab Lemming | June 19, 2009 11:38 PM
@CPP: Good, back to normal form. Good to know you are OK. I was worried about you. All the best. The Animal.
-Danimal
Posted by: Danimal | June 20, 2009 1:18 AM
Hey Lab Lemming,
In such cases you should not discuss any unpublished data presented at the conference. Easy.
Posted by: Daniel MacArthur | June 20, 2009 6:31 AM
Very interesting thread here. I just came back from a 2 day conference on microbiology and bacteriology. This topic was very much on my mind as I sat there listening to the conference speakers and walked around posters.
One thing that I was always admonished about, was that any time you put something in writing, abstract, or presentation form, you are making a 'public' disclosure. There is the argument that this has limited the presentation of new results at general conferences, but for better or for worse, that is the world we live in today. I do not see bloggers or twitterers as anything but another form of communication that has to be addressed when you are preparing your talks / posters. Once you get up to present, it is naive to thing that everyone in the room will adhere to scientific ideologies or to proper protocol.
The idea that people will talk about your science and try to present it in an unethical or demeaning manner is nothing new. It is that in this day and age, it happens instantly.
Posted by: Hector | June 20, 2009 11:50 AM
I've always used the rule of thumb, "If it's in the abstract (and therefore already all over the internet), it's fair game."
Is this no longer kosher?
Posted by: Lab Lemming | June 20, 2009 8:00 PM