The New York Review of Books has a new article up about blogging, and although much of what Sarah Boxer says is familiar it seems that science blogs have a different sort of existence on the web than what's described in the piece. I'll keep my grumbling that the recently published Open Laboratory wasn't given a mention to a minimum, but one particular passage struck me as a bit odd;
Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that's no way to blog.
By this definition science blogs just can't cut it, and although they represent a small piece of the blogospheric pie, I think the drawbacks Boxer mentions are very real concerns for science bloggers (many of which were discussed at the SBC last weekend). Copyright issues, anonymity, effective writing style, etc. are all things that have brought science bloggers in general closer to journalists than other bloggers. I'm sure many of you know this already but I do get paid a little bit for blogging here on Sb, but I don't think that somehow undercuts what I write or how I go about it. Rather than looking at my move to Sb as "Oh, now I'm a big time blogger who gets paid," I simply looked at it as an opportunity to reach more people. On top of that, it was a honor to be diffusing my thoughts onto the internet alongside so many other writers that I had been checking out every day, and I doubt that any of us here are suffering because we're a part of a blogging community set up by SEED (quite the contrary).
I suppose the disparity between the sort of blogging Boxer describes in the article and what science bloggers engage in is part of the reason why it's still a struggle for science bloggers to be taken seriously. Many people look at science blogs as a simple extrapolation of more normative forms of blogging, i.e. bad grammar, bad spelling, lots of unsupported opinion, stolen images & videos, etc. etc. etc. From what I can tell, though, science bloggers hold themselves to an entirely different standard and popularity requires not only a talent for good writing but accuracy and insightful commentary. There may be exceptions, of course, and science blogging likely exists on a continuum of varying levels of rigor and discourse, but overall the blogs I read every day don't resemble the sort of blogs Boxer is writing about. Like some of the writers behind the blogs (and I would count myself among this group), science blogs are perhaps the nerds on the playground, respected within our own ranks but not necessarily outside them. Not yet, anyway.
My own perspective is, of course, narrow and biased, but I consider blogging here to be the most valuable thing that I do. It's a hobby that has fed into itself to a degree that I probably learn more rifling through my bookshelves and downloading everything I can find about "hopeful monsters" from Google Scholar than I do in a classroom. Is this blog personal? Absolutely; "Laelaps" is as much a journal of my intellectual development as it is about natural history, but I don't feel like what I do has some vainglorious motivation behind it. When I write something like the Goldschmidt post I just referenced, I'm sticking my neck out a bit, covering a topic where I know there are scientists and other intelligent folks out there with more experience than me that could very easily cut me down to size. When I wake up in the morning and check my e-mail and see a slew of comments on one particular post, especially when that post involves a controversial topic, I often think "Oh geez, what did I get wrong?" That, perhaps, is a fluke of my own personality more than anything else, but the point is that this blog allows me to share what I am trying learn, integrating seemingly disparate ideas into what I've already taken in (and even occasionally rooting out things that I was wrong about). Once I've posted something, it's out there in the community for better or worse, and it is the community aspect of science blogging that has really helped to form a sort of internal code of ethics in the emerging medium.
Perhaps I share more with the "average blogger"* than I initially let on; my writing is a reflection of who I am just as much as it is about whatever scientific tidbits I might consider interesting. I do care about how many people are reading, when I get linked to, and all those other things that come along with writing on the internet. Whatever small differences there may be between me and a blogger who concentrates on day-to-day life outside the context of science, though, the differences in focus have resulted in very different animals. This blog, then, has always been something of a hopeful monster, a personal experiment that I was never quite sure would be a success or a failure. So far I think I could call it a success, and I am optimistic about the continued persistence and evolution of this blog (and all other science blogs) in the coming days, months, and years.
*I don't mean this phrase as a pejorative. It was simply the only thing I could come up with at the moment to note the difference between the focus of this blog and the focus on the majority of bloggers who do not regularly write about science.
[Thanks to John for the tip.]
[I also wanted to share a little thing that made me smile yesterday that is related to what I wrote here but does not exactly fit. I received the new edition of SEED in the mail the other day and, while flipping through it, came across a full page ad for ScienceBlogs.com. The names of all the blogs on Sb made up the background, most of them barely distinguishable and some of them in bright green. Even though "Laelaps" was one of the ones that remained cryptic, I was still proud to see it there on that page.]
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I know my mother is looking over my shoulder, because she's commented on my blog. How else should we keep in touch while I'm wandering the Earth, doing physics? She's even started reading some of the blogs to which I link. Hi, Mom!
Among the people whom I know read my posts at least occasionally are John Armstrong and John Baez, who know far more mathematics than I; Russell Blackford, who's read a great deal more philosophy than I; Greg Egan, who was publishing science fiction when I was still a larval geek just starting to read science fiction. . . . It's quite intimidating, but it is also very useful: a professional biologist's comments on an offhand remark I'd made about some new research in population genetics might, over the next month or so, grow into a small research project, the sort of thing which could well get published.
I think she makes a very valid point: the more external supports a blog has (advertisers, sponsors, site hosts, etc.) the potential freedom the blogger has. Even if there is never any pressure to say or refrain from saying certain things, it adds new considerations.
As human beings, we're very sensitive to the opinions and judgements of our social cohorts. In a medium where what you write can instantly reach millions of people, and any one of them can communicate back with you, we would expect these instinctual concerns to be amplified.
There's also the temptation not to say what you think but to say what you think will produce a desirable result. Success can be its own pressure; sadly, there's no remedy.
MOving to Sb made me a better blogger - I am less likely to spout of unsupported opinion than before, and when I do, I advertise it as such quite openly. Being here raised my own criteria, made me check my sources better, yet did not, IMHO, reduce my personality, etc.
And yes, my Mom reads my blog, comments on it, and sometimes guests-blogs on it (including a five-parter next week, starting tomorrow).
As a D-List blogger who also writes on issues of science, I can say that it is nice to have absolutely no constraints on what I write except for my own self-imposed censorship. I do have to keep in mind that when I throw my hat in the ring for a political race it could likely come back to haunt me that I write about atheism and other topics non-scientifical; and so that constricts me from writing about my personal life to some degree.
That being said, I get a tremendous amount of satisfaction when the original author of a study praises my interpretation of their work (as has happened on at least two occasions.)
I would say that what you write here, and what Blake writes on his own blog (Caledonian, where is yours?) have tremendous value in revealing the "Green Room" of science publishing and I deeply appreciate that you are open in how you approach even this new iteration of Laelaps. It has expanded my appreciation of science appreciably, and Pharyngula has been a stepping stone to the world of Science Blogging.
I think she reads all of the wrong blogs, given the examples she uses.
I am not a scientist. But my segment of the general public does "need" the latest scientific research presented in an immediate accessible manner - and just as importantly, we need general news stories analyzed for us scientifically.
Yet actually Boxer's analysis does reflect much of what I see elsewhere on the web, and the reason that I read ScienceBlogs is precisely because it is so different from the norm.
The nature of science (and perhaps the hidden presence of the publisher) does seem to enforce an element of "control" upon you.
The blog concept allows the benefits hinted by Boxer - the immediacy of information, the ready links to references - but within the Seed framework I guess you would not be allowed to get away with the poor spelling and grammar, the unverified references and the salacious gossip that pervades the rest of the web.
So that is why I read ScienceBlogs, including yours. Of course I have my own blogging rules, but I am pleased that yours are different.
Perhaps a better way of putting it:
ScienceBlogs is a community, and no matter how welcoming, permissive, and non-judgemental a community is, joining one will change the way any social being thinks about what it does and how it behaves.
The fact that Seed could choose to pull the plug only adds another layer to the phenomenon.
"Copyright issues, anonymity, effective writing style, etc. are all things that have brought science bloggers in general closer to journalists than other bloggers."
Perhaps the key is that credentialed science journalists are in the red. The science journalism part of most newspapers and magazines tends to be done by someone with little to no scientific training. This is a problem I hear from many people, including science journalists with a science degree, and that I have faced (as have Laelaps, T. Ryan Gregory, and just about any science blogger) in my own perusing of the mainstream media outlets.
Is science journalism a dying breed or an underappreciated breed? I haven't been paying attention long enough to know if science journalism had is heyday in the media or not. But today I see a large need for it, but who is paying?
I feel that people are starting more and more to turn to blogs to get the perspective they are missing out on from this lack of journalism. I love it when I am corrected in my comments by one of my lurkers. It shows people care about what they are reading. So perhaps science bloggers are closer to journalists because we recognize in our profession a need for such activities and take it upon ourselves to do the job right (at least what we feel is right). Plus, people love the personality in blogs, it brings a human side to writing.