I am not an active research scientist – I am a professional scienceblogger and I work for a science publisher. I am open about it.

As the post was about the “kabuki” and science journalism was a side-issue, you need to follow some of the links within for more of the stuff I have written specifically about science journalism, and journalism as a whole, in order to see a more complete picture of my views on the topic. Archives – categories “Media”, “Open Science”, “Science Reporting”.

I budget myself 1-2 hours per day to spend in the blogosphere and that means I have to choose carefully the things I write about. When I get on a bend where I am blogging about being a mother I sometimes think, “I wish I were writing more science.” When I get on a kick when I write about science I somethings think, “I wish I were writing more about my lifestyle.” I’ve got a notebook full of stuff to write about. I’m not sure I’ve found an effective middle ground, but the fact of the matter is that I don’t think scientists lack the ability to communicate to the public, per se, it’s that we’re not rewarded for it in the same way we are rewaded for turning out a peer-reviewed publication.

I think that as the blogosphere becomes more accepted in academia, academics will see it as a valuable instrument for disseminating science and dialoging with the public. In the meantime, people who value this as an important medium will keep plugging away. I was thrilled to have been contacted by the head of my professional society and to receive such positive reinforcement. Progress, no?

And now, I must turn back the clock to get some sleep before the Isis children awake.

What there are are a bunch of different “language games.” Each activity—scientific talk, teaching undergraduates, grant writing, science blogging, science journalism—has different rules that participants (speakers, listeners, readers, moderators, &c.) play by. The term “communication,” it seems to me, abstracts unfairly from these different categories. Because you’re good at one doesn’t mean you’re good at another. And more to the point, what’s really at issue is the ability to recognize when you’re in one language game versus another. I think that much of why many trained scientists are “ineffective communicators” to the public has to do with an inability or reluctance to recognize that there are fundamentally different rules in the “public discourse” language game.

Think of it this way: science journalists, science bloggers, and really good teachers all have very, very different amounts of and kinds of authority with respect to their audiences, even beyond how much relevant background knowledge these audiences may or may not have. And being an “effective communicator” means more than just figuring out how to “translate” ideas into and out of the relevant level of and relationship to jargon (e.g. undergraduates are expected to learn the jargon, but not newspaper readers). You might think of this in terms of how different audiences’ interest is stimulated or directed, or how much trust they have that an effort to understand new ideas will “pay off” (whatever that means in whichever context we’re in). Students have their interests largely dictated for them (I tell you what you need to know), and the payoff is pretty well understood (grades, professionalization, degree-granting, intellectual stimulation). What good teachers do is manage these complex relationships between trust, interest, and payoff well. But journalists can hardly do the same thing. And so “good communication” here has something to do with managing the much more complex and tacit ways of eliciting (the weirdly abstract category of “public”) interest, managing institutional authorities (individual scientists, universities, degrees, newspapers, governments, &c.), and issues of “relevance” (where science-journalism runs up against other journalistic language games like political-journalism). And science bloggers have yet another set of complex concerns in terms of authority (built up much more around questions of personal interest and style; in classical rhetoric, the “ethical appeal”).

I’m not sure where that gets us, but it seems to me to be a really useful way to think about what’s at issue in making scientific knowledge available in domains other than academic institutions. And it’s an argument for scientific journalism to continue, as separate from science blogging. And, moreover, I think it helps explain why many researchers and professors don’t necessarily make good science journalists beyond, “they spend their time titrating things.”

So, that leaves teaching, which by definition does entail communicating technical concepts to a lay audience. Well, it does at at introductory and intermediate levels of college teaching, anyway. But while I do think some professors care about teaching, a lot don’t. A lot don’t see it as an important part of their job, just something they have to do. And I’m not just going on stereotypes here. I’ve taken those classes, and more recently, I’ve interviewed those scientists. And that ignores the many researchers whose jobs don’t entail teaching at all, thus reducing their need to translate their ideas for a lay audience even further.

I don’t know enough about it to say anything intelligent about the future of or need for good science journalism and I certainly don’t claim that all scientists (or even most) are great communicators, but I think you have mischaracterized scientists as non-interactive lab machines.

And for the record, I’m guessing that if you asked most scientists, the thing they get to spend the most “precious little time” doing is their actual science. Even the titrating.