Reality TV Science?!

I think it is more than just a coincidence that, in the age of a reality TV style presidency, we also have started to observe the growth of reality TV science.  

For a long time, good old, boring peer-reviewed publications were the only way to get scientific work published and cited. However, a few years ago, arXiv crept up, and, in parallel, GitHub emerged. These two amazing tools are targeted at accelerating the rate of development with the fundamental premise being a facilitation of ideas and code sharing in almost real time between researchers while preserving authorship rights. Moreover, there is another fundamental advantage for these tools over traditional peer-reviewed publishing, the minimization of inertia of how things are done. It is not surprising that, every time a revolutionary idea emerges, it gets faced with resistance and suspicion from the scientific establishment. This usually meant delays in publishing any groundbreaking idea outside the realm of incremental improvement. The philosophy is that, with open publishing, a good idea will be exposed to the sunlight and can be picked up and adopted faster than relying on the judgment of a few inherently biased reviewers acting as gatekeepers.

The counter-argument to this is, by doing so, we are turning science into a popularity contest. This also results in giving brand name sources even more control over the narrative. Moreover, as the goal now is to make your work popular as fast as possible, it leads scientists to crave citations numbers the same way a teenager craves likes of her selfie. This phenomenon has evolved into what I am calling “Reality TV Science.” Some scientists astutely realized that the same promotion tools used to promote the latest viral sensation on the internet can also be used to promote their latest paper. And, hence, we observed the rise of the science influencer on LinkedIn and Twitter. And, while you are at it, if you really want your work noticed, why not create a well-produced, quirky YouTube video describing the highlights of your paper (e.g., see exhibit A :-).

To be clear, I am not taking a position on this new wave- as I see both the good and the bad in it. For instance, it might be the means to bridge the chasm between science/scientist and the rest of the population. This would have a positive impact on society and might help scientists understand the needs of the public more. Moreover, this humanization of scientists might be the one thing that has been missing to convince more females to choose science and engineering as a field of study (more on this in future articles :-).

Regardless of where you stand on this emerging phenomenon, we need to pay more attention and use our critical hat more often than not to separate the good from the bluff- as there is a lot of that running around now. And, I have no doubt that good ideas will eventually prevail.