Facebook and similar social networking sites hold vast potential for reaching non-traditional audiences for science. As the NY Times reports today, Facebook has 25 million users and growing as the company plans bold new features and opens up its user base to almost anyone with an email account. Social networking sites are important new platforms for science communication since they facilitate two of the key strategies I have pushed in the past in reaching broader American audiences about science.
First, they have the potential to facilitate incidental exposure, in other words they can reach non-traditional audiences with content about science in an online space where they are not otherwise looking for it. Facebook takes on the big problems of choice and audience preference gaps in reaching the wider public.
Second, users with an interest in and enthusiasm for science can serve as "science navigators" or opinion-leaders, passing on information to friends about new science-related events or issues in science, recruiting friends to participate in science-related activities or campaigns.
There is already a fertile network of "Common Interest-Science" groups on Facebook. And there is untapped potential for cross-cutting ties between these members and other content areas such as Politics, Current Events, Philosophy, Beliefs & Causes, and Religion & Spirituality. (Indeed, sociologists who study boundary work could have a field day studying how the arbitrary lines we often draw in the "real world" between institutions and areas of knowledge are blurred at social networking sites.)
So here's an idea: How about official Facebook pages and groups for the Exploratorium, 2009: The Year of Science, NASA, AAAS, the National Academies or other scientific organizations?
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Also check out ResearchCrossroads http://www.researchcrossroads.com - they are a MySpace for research/science that have created profiles for most anyone that's received gov't funding.
What would you like to see from an official agency site, say Earth science at NASA, for example?
This sounds fantastic.
I believe that your last idea is very important. The communications should come from a scientific organization or society. This will allow the discussion to be framed properly and come from a unified source. If individual scientists wanted to communicate they could do it through the society site. This will prevent the confusion that would arise if every scientist tried to have their own site. A unified and trusted source is important to communicating with the public.
You can only have profiles as people: non-people profiles are being deleted by Facebook, so if by "pages" in the last paragraph you mean "profiles", that won't work.
They also have a very strict "1 profile per person" rule, so you can't have one profile for random communication and one of science promotion.
Science groups or events are nor problem of course, but I'm pretty sure Facebook's policy doesn't allow the creating of profiles for the sake of promoting science. (Or anything, really).
Disclaimer: I'm in no way associated with Facebook, I just spend too much time there and have seen profiles get deleted for such reasons. (And frankly, I agree with that policy.)
Any thoughts on the differences between MySpace and Facebook in terms of science?
One of the problems with Facebook is that it is starting to become overflooded with "stuff". Just the cluttering and accumulation of information becomes too much, and something like an interesting science event might get lost in the flow. I don't find "group" web pages to much very useful, other than in small settings for people's interpersonal relationships.
On the other hand, Facebook does have a good event notification/invitation system going, and if there is a strong word-of-mouth presence, then it might make a good system for drumming up attendence at various science-y stuff.
I think there's a lot of merit in this idea: enthusiastic, informed people sharing their love of science and knowledge, and setting the stage for spreading information. But suggesting that the effort be channeled through official academies smacks more of declaration than conversation. People spread enthusiasm and help contextualize knowledge; the academy rarely does.
Of course, the issues are time and commitment to these social networking sites. It takes dedicated staff time and we're often asked what the payoff is for these Web 2.0 acitivites. It's okay to try as experimentation to see whether there is traction, but long term the community looks to studies on effectiveness not just traffic. That's where the work of people like you come in and museum professionals should be looking at the research.
By the way, we do have a profile on myspace as a museum
www.myspace.com/exploratoriumsf
What about Second Life?
One serious concern is "focus." I've lived in Hollywood for the past 12 years and watched a lot of sharp people run around in circles communicating endlessly (until you want to ask them to STOP communicating so much) and yet accomplishing very little. Somehow the signal to noise ratio of these great new communication pathways needs to also be evaluated. What's the old song -- "what are words for when no one listens any more?"