The Ghost of Oneself on the Web

Comedians complain about it, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t too. They complain because U-tube, iPlayer etc mean that their jokes can’t be repeatedly recycled the way they were in the good old days. Once they’ve told one that’s actually funny it will lurk in the aether (or do I mean Cloud), pulled out by chance Googlers or determined followers time and time again; its novelty value will be gone. Another performance, another place, another year and a constant supply of new material is required.

Now I’m not one for telling jokes of the comedic kind. My style of humour tends towards the self-deprecating aside when I give talks but nevertheless, just as for the comedian, a lot of work goes into those talks. For all, as I said in a recent post, I don’t think one should recycle whole talks over and over, that is not to say that one will never reuse any material, mixing things up to suit the audience. However, if the organisation you are speaking to puts your slides up on the web (or worse, posts a video) as they seem increasingly keen to do, then it can become only too plain just how much recycling may have occurred.

I’ll illustrate why this concerns me using as an example the ocassion of a talk I gave recently at the University of Kent in their Open Lecture series. It was a general talk – my title was ‘Citizens, Science and Citizen Science’ – rather than something specific about my research.  As an aside I’ll point out that things got off to a very shaky start as my computer threw a tantrum on the train down, at which point I realised that my over-confidence in technology meant I hadn’t got a copy on a memory stick by way of a back-up. Mercifully that story has a happy ending, as the laptop finally got itself out of the non-responsive loop it had entered just in time, shortly before I reached Canterbury station. The experience should have taught me a lesson which I shouldn’t have needed teaching anyhow – but more on this below.

Before my talk I was invited to meet up with some of the Athena Swan departmental and university leads and members of the HR team for an informal discussion about gender issues. I was greeted by Twitter acquaintance Cindy Vallance, who had clearly been doing her homework about me. She had found on the web a previous talk I had given on Athena Swan issues (and no I’m not going to tell you where she had found it) and had printed out the slides to provide useful background material for the attendees at the discussion. This brought home to me the dangers of allowing one’s Powerpoint slides to be put up in perpetuity; at the time of the original talk the request to be allowed to do so for internal consumption in the university concerned had seemed harmless enough. Now I know that in principle even if I recycle just some of the material it may be rather obvious. This has been very much on my mind as I prepared a talk on Athena Swan for Swansea University which I’m giving tomorrow. They have anyhow asked for the slides in advance to circulate to attendees, but at least that only means a defined set of keen individuals not that the world at large will have access to them.

However, this experience meant when after the Kent formal lecture I was asked if I could supply my slides, I was more circumspect. Yes, I said, but only to be handed out to those who specifically ask for them, not simply to be made freely available on the web. I work hard at my talks and in that particular one I had a goodly selection of quotes taken from across the centuries. I worry that my attempts at apposite quotations or words of wisdom will just become stale and obvious if they are there for everyone to see, but maybe I’m just being mean by not wanting to make them available to all and sundry.

So the long term availability of one’s carefully crafted talks is part of the spectral legacy my title refers to. But there is another aspect that concerns me, although I have considerably less control over this. This refers to inaccurate reporting and out of date information continuing to circulate so that ‘facts’ become established that are anything but.  Statements that were once true can become annoyingly outdated yet still be taken at face value. For instance, it is some years since I stopped being Deputy Head of my department in Cambridge, but that tag still crops up in descriptions of me. I can keep my own web pages up to date, but others are unlikely to do so and references won’t be checked for current accuracy. Worse, there is a problem (which I wrote about a while back) in the way the media can twist and alter facts. I discussed this as the problem of Chinese Whispers when an originally correct statement gets sloppily reworked by a journalist. Anyone can suffer from this fate, no doubt celebrities to an extent no average scientist could begin to imagine. Nevertheless, as the errors and misinformation get propagated from an original source to multiple others, it is impossible to eradicate the misleading statements and general inaccuracy.

This very problem cropped up in the context of an event I was involved with last week at The Other Club, a ‘pop-up’ temporary club for professional women existing near Carnaby Street in London.  (There is an interesting Churchillian connection there, bearing in mind where I’ll be living this time next year.) Paired up with the wonderful Uta Frith, whom I’ve written about before, we each gave vignettes about our research and then jointly discussed issues connected with women in science. We had a great time, it was standing room only (the organisers were I think surprised by the popularity of a science evening) and the debate was lively. But I noticed that the advertising write up about me on the web had the offending sentence about how I research ‘unconventional areas of physics such as revolutionary treatments for Alzheimer’s‘, exactly the commentary I worried about in the earlier Chinese Whispers blogpost because it is so wrong. This mis-description lives on several years later, because the description in the Guardian is still there to be Googled. Clearly I should have requested a correction at the time and, had I had any idea that this would continue to be quoted, I most certainly would have done. But, naively, I had imagined the misleading statement would quietly vanish, as it once would have done when only available through print media.  Since I was talking to an audience containing journalists I did point out, in precisely this context, the dangers of carelessly misquoting earlier text.

As I say, the evening was great fun – something Mary Beard said too when she wrote about her own appearance at The Other Club – but I was reminded, again, that I should not be complacent about technology. I turned up with my laptop, a PC, only to be greeted with anxious sighs: they only had connections for Macs (this was not a formal lecture theatre after all, just a room over a shop). Luckily Uta had both a Mac and a memory stick, so disaster was averted. Yet again, despite my recent experiences at Kent, I had managed not to bring any back-up. I should, like a naughty schoolchild, write out 100 times lines to the effect that  that ‘I should always travel with a copy on a memory stick of any talk I am going to give‘ to drum it into my thick head and then maybe I won’t continue to skate on thin ice with my presentations.

Everything I write about here refers to mere trivial annoyances. I don’t like the fact that facts about my life may be inaccurate or out of date and I am nervous about my talks being too easily available making repetition of parts of them embarrassing. However, this is not at all the same thing as people being subjected to vitriolic personal attacks, rape threats, challenges to their scientific competence or other kinds of cyber-bullying. There is too much of this viciousness out there on the web. But that is a different and much heavier story.