Getting Away with It

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Athene Donald

Do you feel this phrase describes you as you go through your professional life? Do you feel as if you’re a fraud and whereas everyone else knows what they are doing or deserve the position they have attained, you don’t? And, on top of this, do you worry that you are about to be found out?  If you answered yes to one or both these questions you are probably suffering from Impostor Syndrome. An awful lot of us do, men and women.

Although these two aspects are frequently linked in the literature, personally I don’t feel that ‘getting away with it’ is quite the same thing as Impostor Syndrome. In part I think this is a temporal argument. Getting away with it implies you have done something with which to get away, whereas impostor syndrome creeps up on you beforehand, as you are about to undertake something new. So Impostor Syndrome comes first, the getting away with it bit may (or may not) be the consequence afterwards. However, the two clearly have the potential to go hand in hand.

I wrote about Impostor Syndrome a couple of years ago and provoked a great stream of fascinating comments on my blog. I also found myself being interviewed for Radio 4’s Something Understood by Felicity Finch, who wanted to focus entirely on the getting away with it aspect. (You can hear a snippet of that interview here).  I found it harder to put my own sense of being an impostor into the ‘getting away with it’ scenario, because of the distinction I feel between the two strands. Gaby Hinsliff also interviewed me as part of an article she wrote for the Daily Mail, a piece which I think came much closer to a portrayal of how I perceive Impostor Syndrome, citing many individual’s reaction to their success as being constantly accompanied by a feeling that they were merely frauds. Much more recently the Times Higher Education has got in on the act with a feature article in which an Australian academic, Ruth Barcan, wrote about what she termed ‘feelings of fraudulence’, although as far as I can see this is exactly the same as Impostor Syndrome. I’m not sure why she needed to coin a new phrase for the condition.

Her take on the problem was that Impostor Syndrome is particularly common in academia because of its competitiveness and the constant emphasis on critical thought which can turn inward, but the syndrome is neither new nor confined to academics. Nor, it appears, is it confined to women (see fellow OT blogger Stephen Curry recently facing up to his own worries here); it may be the case that women are more prepared to admit to the feeling, but it is clear that many men feel just the same. So, it would seem, for a substantial proportion of us we spend a lot of our time feeling inadequate, fraudulent and uncertain why we have ended up where we are.

However, most of us muddle through, just hoping that that moment of unmasking when someone says ‘oh it’s only you, I was expecting someone competent‘ never actually transpires. (Although, if you read The Onion, you may realise it is just about to happen after all!) What matters, I suppose, is how we learn to cope with the feeling. If we don’t, we may end up so paralysed with fear of the unknown and the humiliation that might conceivably come with trying and failing that we never spread our wings at all. So it is well worth recognizing the mindset as a normal state for many people, however successful they may look from the outside, not something that’s unique to you indicating that you should just give up and walk away.

This is all very much on my mind because, next week, I am participating in a ‘conversation‘ with someone who is an expert on Impostor Syndrome, who indeed travels around giving seminars on the subject. This is Hugh Kearns, a self-declared public speaker, educator and researcher with expertise in self-management, positive psychology, work-life balance, learning and creativity. Based at Flinders University in Australia, he is currently spending some months in the UK and has already held workshops and seminars at other universities over here (see one write-up here).

Here is a nice irony. I, a complete non-expert on the topic, am to hold a public conversation with him thereby giving me a wonderful chance to demonstrate Impostor Syndrome in action. In fact, I am pleased to say, that is not how I feel about this particular situation.  No one is going to expect me to be an ‘expert’ in a scholastic sense, merely by experience – hence, remarkably, I feel less prone to fears than usual. Let it not be thought that I have mastered Impostor Syndrome. It still rises up and bites me with monotonous regularity. If, as I believe, it is a sensation most likely to hit you the first time you do something – although it may well continue in a dull, thudding kind of way as a background to one’s entire life if you’re unlucky – then I still have plenty of new challenges to trip me up and to remind me that I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’ve been asked to do it.

For instance, although I didn’t spell it out in my post on the subject, I found hosting the lunch for MP and Shadow Business Secretary Chuka Umunna one such opportunity to feel ‘why me, what do I know, I’ll be found out as wanting in knowledge about industrial policy‘. In this case the feeling of being an impostor on that front was well-founded, but I was really wanted simply as a neutral chair in case views got heated, the person who could represent the University as a senior individual (specifically as a Deputy Vice Chancellor) not an expert. I could rationalise that and relax a little, although I remained somewhat apprehensive. And that I think is the advantage of being more experienced or, to be blunt, old. I am much more able to rationalise my fears because I have had to do so many bizarre things and on the whole I haven’t made a complete fool of myself. Much.  Very often. I think. And if I do, I am better able to laugh it off. As a youngster one is so much more prone to blush to the roots of one’s hair – with my colouring there is no hiding it – visibly shake or develop a tremor in one’s voice. Impostor Syndrome may not go away, but the ability to push it swiftly back in its place grows with time, if you allow yourself the chance.

As for ‘getting away with it’, perhaps that too becomes less scary with time. Like a petty criminal who has got away with pilfering regularly, the next attempt will seem more matter of fact, less daunting. So if you’ve stood in front of 400 first year students one year and survived without more than the customary amount of critical comment about one’s style of delivery/lecture notes and/or dress in the end of term questionnaires, the next year is less terrifying. If you’ve had to converse with a Minister of State for 20 minutes in a tense professional situation, it gives one confidence that you can hold your own in the future when confronted by politicians more generally.

So, if your knees are quaking at some new challenge, if you feel that you have achieved something by mere luck and not your innate cleverness, try to see things as others see it. I may be no academic expert on Impostor Syndrome but I do think realising that it is a common sensation even amongst those – regardless of gender and way beyond academia – that you admire as confident and successful individuals may in itself be helpful.  So read this and take heart.

Endnote Between drafting this post and posting it I came across another recent post which echoes much of what I write here, reinforcing my message that a good strategy to adopt in the face of one’s own feelings of inadequacy is to recognize how widespread this phenomenon is.

Posted in Academia, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

Winston Churchill and Science

Posted on January 29, 2014 by Athene Donald

Yet another anniversary for Winston Churchill has just past, with the 49th anniversary of his death falling on January 24th. I am, inevitably, more conscious of this than I would have been in times past, but it is interesting to note that my childish diary for 1965 notes, in appalling handwriting, both his death and what I refer to as his ‘Memorial Service’. I assume this was actually his funeral (on January 30th). Indeed I do in fact remember the events surrounding his death because, as it happened, I went to the Albert Hall on January 23rd that year and en route walked past the end of the road where he was dying – Hyde Park Gate – and this has stuck in my mind. My diary tells me, something I certainly had not remembered, I was going to see the British Trampoline and Gymnastic Championships; I even recorded the names of some of the winners!

One of my aims over the coming months must be to get more familiar with the life of Winston Churchill, since I will now be so closely associated with his name and his legacy. (If you don’t know why, see here.) So I have set myself a diet of appropriate reading including a formal biography (by Roy Jenkins, which I did actually read some years ago and thoroughly enjoyed, but it’s time to refresh my memory); a gossipy biography (by Mary Lowell, which covers the more extended family and their affairs, in all senses, which I have just finished); the personal view (by his daughter Mary Soames, still to be tackled); a more informal biography (by Nigel Knight, Fellow and Director of Studies in Economics at Churchill College, whose book is subtitled ‘The Greatest Briton unmasked’  which I haven’t touched yet); and the more scientific Churchill’s Bomb which I have recently finished reading, This last is by Graham Farmelo, who is a bye-fellow of the College and who has delved thoroughly into the Churchill Archives there .

I don’t intend to write book reviews of any of these, nor rehash Churchill’s life story, but I wanted to explore some of the issues and things I learned from this last book, which was quite an eye-opener on many fronts. I already was well aware that Henry Tizard and Frederick Lindemann, two senior scientists involved with policy during the 2nd World War, loathed each other. In Farmelo’s book Lindemann (aka Lord Cherwell) does not come out as a particularly attractive character. Tizard, because he wasn’t within the Churchill charmed circle, does not feature much at all. But Lindemann, the ‘Prof’ to Churchill, had immense influence and was the conduit for much of what Churchill did, and did not know, about nuclear physics.

Churchill seems, in some senses, to have been an ‘early adopter’ of the principle of the potential power of nuclear fission for stimulating Armageddon, largely due to conversations with his friend HG Wells. Wells’ fiction introduces the idea of an ‘atomic bomb’ as early as 1913 as he wrote The World Set Free, but it was of course just a dramatic fiction at that point. During the 1920’s and early 1930’s Churchill thought – and wrote – a lot about possible future weaponry derived from science, and in particular nuclear physics. By 1931 he could say

It would be much better to call a halt in material progress and [scientific] discovery rather than to be mastered by our own apparatus and the forces which it directs.

Nevertheless, by the time he was Prime Minister during the war he seems – perhaps understandably given the number of crises he was contending with on a daily basis – rather to have taken his eye off the nuclear ball. He didn’t seem to notice what was going on as the UK obfuscatingly titled ‘Tube Alloys’ project morphed and was consumed by the many-times-larger US-based Manhattan Project, with the UK scientists marginalised and UK oversight and control ceded almost by default although many of the basic principles originated with research in the UK.

What I found most interesting of all, because I had least appreciation of it, was what happened after the war, not only about the further developments in cataclysmic weaponry but also as regards civil nuclear power. So many of our current problems with the nuclear industry are tied to the poor decisions taken back then. For a detailed discussion of this issue take a look at a recent post by Richard Jones who explains the different potential variants of reactor design and their consequences in some detail. But, as he spells out, the technology we have ended up with in our power stations is ‘locked-in’ technology, tied in with past military needs in large part because of Churchill’s actions (and inactions) during and after the war.

Churchill wanted the UK to have its own nuclear know-how, without dependence on the Americans, although he seems to have vacillated as to whether this also meant pursuing having the weapons themselves, an uncertainty which seems to have irritated Lindemann beyond measure. By 1953, as a programme for developing civil nuclear power was being worked up, with the man who was to be Churchill College’s first master (John Cockcroft) playing a pivotal role at Harwell, it was decided that the civil and military developments would go hand in hand, with new reactors to be built with the dual capability of producing both weapons-grade plutonium and the energy for the nation. Priority was given to the military aspect, despite the acute need for enhanced energy production.

Perhaps if Cockcroft’s own position had taken priority (he wanted the civil side of things to dominate), things would have panned out very differently and the UK would not be where it is now. Churchill may have believed in the atomic bomb only as a deterrent, rather than wanting actually to use one, but he certainly seems to have been unconcerned with any potential energy crisis during the to-ing and fro-ing – with the Americans as well as internally within in the UK – that took place over the months of his last Premiership. Cockcroft himself became an increasingly influential scientific advisor to Churchill, and had a hand to play in the creation of what went on to become CERN. Additionally, he had the challenge/opportunity of taking Churchill round the Harwell site where he was based and he continued to be involved with the tensions over whether an H-bomb should be constructed by Britain.

Like so much about Churchill, his views towards science and scientists seem to have been very complex. Despite ending up with a college named after him which, by Statute, requires 70% of its members to be scientists and engineers, his views about universities convey a desire of putting some sorts of restraints on these personnel. For instance, when receiving an Honorary Degree from the University of Copenhagen in 1950 he remarked:

The first duty of the university is to teach wisdom, not a trade; character, not technicalities. We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we do not want a world of engineers. We want some scientists, but we must make sure that science is our servant and not our master. It may be that the human race has already found out more than its present imperfect and incomplete structure will enable it to digest.

This was a man, after all, who was no natural when it came to numbers; his Nobel Prize was for literature. Nevertheless, during his life he did support much scientific research and he was also happy that science did not always have to serve society as master. His remarks when in 1959 he visited the college founded in his honour, show that he would not necessarily have been in tune with the current impact agenda, believing that fundamental research may pay dividends in ways as yet unknown, saying

Let no one believe that the lunar rockets, of which we read in the press, are merely ingenious bids for prestige. They are manifestations of a formidable advance in technology. As with many vehicles of pure research, their immediate uses may not be apparent. But I do not doubt that they will ultimately reap a rich harvest for those who have the imagination and power to develop them, and to probe ever more deeply into the mysteries of the universe in which we live.

I am sure these are both quotes I will be using in future after-dinner speeches in the college, but I need to garner a lot more in the coming months….

 

 

 

Posted in History of Science | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

The Cost of Speaking Out

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Athene Donald

The press (at least in the UK) has been full of the ‘Lord Rennard’ story this week. A man, hugely influential in building up the success of the LibDems but against whom four women (party activists) have spoken out, saying he had harassed them. This is not the place to dwell on the rights and wrongs of this, but it seems appropriate to consider the costs of speaking out. If the costs are high, will women do it? This is an episode that will also be reminiscent of the recent stories surrounding Bora Zivkovic (see here for just one write-up if you missed last autumn’s unfolding storyline). Bora was a man with a reputation for being hugely supportive of women yet who could still behave in ways that made young women around him hugely uncomfortable.  It matters not whether this was a power thing, a sexual thing, or just naivety on his part for what I want to say here.

I believe the view enshrined in my own university’s cumbersomely entitled ‘Dignity at Work‘ policy is correct (this covers far more than gender issues). Put simply, if it feels wrong to the recipient it is wrong, although it is expressed more formally in our policy:

Within the University’s definitions, behaviour is defined as inappropriate if it is:

  • Unwanted by the recipient.
  • Perceived by the recipient as violating his or her dignity and/or creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment.
  • Having regard to all the circumstances, including the recipient’s perception, the behaviour could reasonably be considered as having that effect.

It is not enough to say ‘I didn’t mean to offend’ – it only matters that offence is caused. It most certainly is not enough to say something along the lines of ‘”I’m sure .. least half of the members of the House of Lords have pinched a woman’s bottom … at some time in their lives”, a quote attributed to Lord Greaves.That other people have acted inappropriately and got away with it does not make anyone else’s behaviour any better.  That is as true here as when it comes to being caught speeding by the police.

The trouble is that the cost of speaking out, only to be met with a negative response, can become fantastically high, particularly if you find yourself doing it on your own. (As in  Bora’s case, though, when one woman does dare to stick her head above the parapet she may well find she is not alone.) Indeed, speaking out can lead women to some very dark places, as many women have had the bravery to describe on blogs and in the media. It is only relatively recently I have had the misfortune to be caught up in some very pale imitation of these situations, but the way I was left feeling brought home to me just how appalling the experience can be. The circumstances are immaterial and I am deliberately going to do all I can to obscure them. This is not a witch hunt against anyone. I simply want to remind people reading this of some consequences of their actions (or inaction).

So, here goes with my own disclosure. Some years ago a senior male colleague behaved – in a public situation – in ways I found incomprehensible, demeaning to me as a senior professional and totally distasteful. What he did was, by comparison with many tales, insignificant but it was still most unpleasant. There was no point reporting it, or so I thought, not least because others were present and would have noted it. But some time later a situation arose in which it became clear to me that, as Gender Equality Champion, it was my responsibility to speak out about the individual concerned – again very publicly – just in case the person in question had actually been behaving inappropriately with much more vulnerable people, over whom he might have exercised power in some sense.  I had no evidence he had done so, but it seemed to me imperative that the question was asked given my own experience.

Everyone was very nice to me. In some senses. I wasn’t met with disbelief. I’m sure my ‘evidence’ was accepted as that was the way it was. But, then the qualifiers crept in. I was told ‘oh yes, he behaved like that with many female colleagues, that’ s just how he was, but he was immensely supportive of women‘ (this from a woman) – and evidence to back up that last phrase was provided. I was also told that we should not judge him by current standards for behaviour from the past, that ‘it’s always gone on‘ as justification for ignoring it now. I was told we shouldn’t adopt a witch hunt mentality and nor should we single him out when the behaviour of others in question couldn’t/wouldn’t receive similar scrutiny, because that wasn’t treating him fairly. I cannot accept these positions. Still, progress was made in that it was agreed that some search would be made to see if there was any prior hard evidence of wrong doings against junior colleagues. Maybe that was the best outcome I could have hoped for.

Nevertheless I came away feeling sullied by the debate and deeply depressed. It was clear that some of my audience would have much preferred it had I kept silent or backed down so it could have been swept firmly under the carpet (although a couple of them did write subsequently to support what I’d done as being ‘brave’). As a senior academic, whose word was not being doubted and whose reputation/future promotion prospects/ or anything else were not on the line so that I had nothing to lose, I still was left shaking, feeling ghastly and diminished. Imagine if I had been a young postdoc challenging a figure in authority. Well, I would simply have never spoken out would I? It would be sheer folly, far too risky. So I believe those seeking evidence of such wrongdoings will simply never find them: it seems to me it would be inconceivable that any young female researcher or student would have dared to speak out even if they had had reason to do so.

I would say all those colleagues of his who knew this went on, who accepted his so-called ‘flirtatiousness’ as okay within a professional setting and with professional colleagues (I don’t care what he does in his private life), implicitly allowed his behaviour to go unchecked probably for many years. Maybe he was very supportive of women when it came to promotions, or advice, or letters of reference or whatever. But if he had been challenged by any one of them who needed his help, literally slapped or verbally stopped in his tracks, would that still have been the case? Was toleration simply conniving, particularly from those men and women who would never need his active support?  And yes I know that you can accuse me of conniving too, because I did nothing, but then I had no way of knowing he was a serial ‘offender’ and assumed it didn’t matter and that he had just had too much to drink. That was clearly naïve, but I had no reason at the time to think otherwise. That must also often be the case in any similar situation, but clearly some people did know that this was this particular person’s habitual way of behaving and still sat on their hands.

I am sometimes astonished by men I know, who demonstrably do good work in supporting women and their progression, and yet who still behave totally inappropriately. Very often it may come out as simply being deeply patronising, using phrases that amount to ‘you’re doing very well as a woman, so I’ll pat you on the  head but never quite take you seriously’. That is all too common. But what about the man who is an active supporter of women but rubs his hand up and down my back when I barely know him? What could have been going through his mind? Why do people do this? Am I meant to be flattered? And if they do it to me at my age I am quite sure they are likely to do it to those much lower down the ladder who are more vulnerable. Do they not make the connection between how they behave to individuals and how they view women as a class?

The bottom line is for men thinking about their behaviour, if you wouldn’t do it to a man, you shouldn’t do it to a woman in a professional setting. And even if you would do it to a man (perhaps simply pat them on the arm), you might consider how it comes across to a woman if your relationship is meant to be professional , particularly if there’s an unequal power dynamic between the two of you. Remember that ‘I didn’t mean to cause offence‘ is not an adequate defence.  Women are not fragile creatures with fantastic imaginations making up occurrences of inappropriate behaviour to trip you up. They are serious professionals who expect to be treated as such. If I, as a senior woman with no reason to fear tangible consequences from speaking out, am still left horrified and internally diminished by the cost of doing so, our society has a long way to go in enabling everyone to feel secure in the workplace and free of anxiety about what their colleagues will do next. No witch hunts are necessary if everyone plays by the rules.  And if they don’t, women are going to have to go on finding the courage to speak out despite the cost in both emotional and professional terms and trust there are sufficient colleagues to lend them all the support they will need after they’ve done so.

Posted in Equality, Women in Science | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

A Pensieve for your Thoughts

Posted on January 18, 2014 by Athene Donald

Last weekend my OT colleague Stephen Curry put up a thoughtful and thought-provoking post reflecting on the shortness of life, where his is going and other angst-inducing topics including obituaries, all provoked by the fact that he was approaching 50. It was an excellent read and I wanted to put out a tweet about it, describing it as pensive. Instead, I nearly found myself describing it as pensieve. The Potter fans amongst you will recognize that word, but for those of you who have avoided being drawn into JK Rowling’s world here’s the definition of a pensieve used by one of the characters

One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one’s mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one’s leisure.

Now wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to do this? Of all the fantastical imaginary things in the Potter books, this strikes me as the most attractive. How often do I sit in a meeting/seminar/on a train and my mind runs free. Suddenly, if the conditions are right, something unexpected pops into my head. I’m sure it happens to us all. Maybe that famed light bulb moment when suddenly all the results slot into the coherent pattern you’ve been searching for high and low (though I’m no great believer in such Eureka moments). More likely it is something rather prosaic but useful: the prompt for the next blogpost, perhaps, or the idea for your mother-in-law’s birthday present. Most likely it is somewhere in between these two extremes: some insight into how to join the dots between disparate ideas you’ve been mulling over for days or an appreciation of what tweak you need to make to the experiment that didn’t work last week suddenly behave itself. Whatever it is, how fantastic it would be if, instead of trying to jot down a few words to remind yourself of the neat idea for when you are in a position to act upon it, you could simply transfer the whole silvery stream of thought to a portable dish from which it could later be recovered with a flick of a wand.

Even when dutifully sitting at my desk pondering some aspect of my work or other, I can find myself trying to think about several (possibly, but not necessarily, related) bits of the problem at once. I want just to do a brain dump of the different strands but there is no mechanism to do this swiftly. Jotting down the key points of one path may mean the others all escape before they can be captured. If I could just wave a wand past my head and collect the relevant ideas in neatly separated strands, ready packaged to be picked up another day, life would be so much easier. Instead I find every surface covered in post-it notes of different sizes, each trying to capture the essence of a single thought, but so often incomprehensible the next time one stumbles upon it.

I have confessed before about the state of my office.  Following my previous post I discover, rather to my irritation, that although I’ve cleared out a lot of filing cabinets our move has been put back a year or two. So, the post-it notes will continue to decorate the surfaces for a while to come (and, for those who wonder, some are virtual post-its actually stored on my iPad). Yet so rarely are they actually useful. What does a note that says ‘failure to understand non-linear model‘ mean? I don’t even now know which project this may refer to. Or how about ‘different timescales – how to bridge?’ That isn’t going to get me very far, but no doubt when I wrote it the phrase seemed important. If I could lift these words along with the context of all that prompted them in a coherent bundle from my pensieve, maybe I could recapture their significance and move on. As it is I am left frustrated and none the wiser.

It isn’t just thoughts around science that I would love to consign to my pensieve. Thoughts about topics for this blog are frequently triggered by things I hear or read, but not at a moment when I can sit down and write. So another set of post-it notes have useful comments like ‘more on impostor syndrome‘ (yes that post is coming soon) or one I’ve just (re)discovered ‘excellence in different cultures‘. For that latter I neither know what triggered the thought by now, nor what I might have thought it should cover although I’m sure it’s a good idea. But a good idea that probably isn’t going to make it onto my own blog any time soon – feel free to make use of it if it strikes a chord with you.

I don’t expect any innovators are going to create a pensieve in the near future, unfortunately. I am quite sure there would be a huge lucrative market for them. Meanwhile I will continue to use up large numbers of those sticky yellow notes, many of which will be consigned to the bin without having delivered the intended message that lurked behind the scribbled words.

 

Posted in Science Culture | Tagged , | 8 Comments

No Comment

Posted on January 12, 2014 by Athene Donald

Dear Reader

I am going to make a complaint. This is a complaint directed to many of you, but by no means all, so bear with me. I know I am not the only blog-writer who feels this way, so I it seems a good moment to register my annoyance. So what has got my beef?

I know you are reading my posts. I see interesting comments circulating, but not on the post itself. I am not on Facebook so I have no idea what happens there, but I do know that on Twitter people often tweet brief remarks, or links to related articles, that it would be great if other people had the opportunity to share. By keeping their remarks in the Twittersphere it is impossible for many other readers to react to the comments and/or to join in the discussion. By its very nature Twitter is ephemeral: here today and gone – certainly by tomorrow and probably sooner. To give a very recent example, when I wrote something about emergence (see here) some people tweeted good links to easily accessible papers or articles. I am sure many people would have appreciated knowing about them in a quasi-permanent way, not simply because they happened to have their Twitter-feed open at the appropriate moment.  Or, referring to the same post, maybe there were other authors whose work confirms or contradicts my position – it would have been great to have added them in. As it was, I was delighted to find philosophers taking a lead in this debate by actually posting comments.

Please take note, as there are many other examples I could cite. That is just one recent case in point.

Even in the relatively short time I have been blogging (actually it’s no longer that short, it’s 3/12 years, but I still feel I’ve only just got going), it would seem the comment stream has significantly dried up. Occasionally I get a lot, but nothing has beaten two relatively early posts about the EPSRC and about Impostor Syndrome. Those two posts undoubtedly got people’s commenting juices going. I wonder if they still would. Perhaps it was down to the specific topics, but I think it is also the case that there is a shift in modus operandi of commentators.

Why do I say I know I am not alone? I was struck by a post I read on the LSE Impact blog about SpotOn2013 by Alan Cann. To quote the relevant section on commenting on posts:

The issue of commenting on blogs was also discussed in the session. For most blogs, comments are dead and any conversation is now based around is now retweets and reposts to social media sites rather than a threaded stream on the original site. The same is also true of online commenting on scientific papers – on the PLOS and Nature websites for example. There is plenty of discussion going on about the content, but it is distributed across many networks rather than being focussed into an easily accessible thread. In spite of a relaxed attitude to this by some, in my opinion this is a problem as it encourages superficial commenting at the expense of more in depth conversation. Sharing on Facebook is a good thing but it is not a substitute for a good discussion thread on a thorny issue. In science in particular, putting your head above the parapet and being seen to criticise the work of senior scientists is still a risky business, even when such comments are made in neutral tones and intended as a positive contribution to ongoing work.

Now I am by and large not going to get upset if a junior scientist doesn’t agree with me (see this earlier post where I reflect on this in a different context), so I hope that is not why people are not writing comments. But I totally agree with Alan Cann that the loss of in-depth dialogue is a shame.

There is another issue when people use Twitter to post comments. Very often they will begin the comment by addressing it to me as @athenedonald. If you do that with no prefix, the only people who will see it will be myself and anyone who happens to follow both me and who is tweeting. Very often I am pretty convinced that is not their intention, but that is the effect, thereby narrowing the range of people who will be party to the tweet to a tiny number. If the tweet is meant to be for general consumption, my twitterhandle has to have something in front of it. Personally I use a full-stop, others use quotes. If there is nothing, the tweet is in essence barely in the public domain.

So, my friends and readers, if you are trying to have a general conversation, can I please urge you to post your comment explicitly on my post. If you really do mean to have a quiet word with me, of course sending me a tweet personally is absolutely fine. But be sure you know that what you’re doing is what you think you’re doing.

Posted in Communicating Science, Science Culture | Tagged , , | 38 Comments