Timo Hanney on Social Not Working [In Science]

After a detailed recapitulation of the principles underlying Web 2.0, Surowiecki’s Wisdom Of Crowds, Chris Anderson’s Long Tail, and the promise of social media, Timo Hanney concludes that the world of science has not yet been infiltrated by these revolutionary tools:

[from Nascent: Social Not Working?]

Personally, I’m optimistic about the potential of the web to greatly improve the productivity – and joy – of doing science. I also think it can help to break down barriers between disciplines, and between science and the rest of society. That’s why I’ve devoted my recent professional life to the pursuit of turning this into a reality.

But I’m less optimistic about the inevitability of this potential being fully realised, at least in anything less than a generational timescale. For every scientist who sees it as self-evident that they should be using these tools, or promoting open information-sharing, there are dozens who just don’t see the point. For every publisher or librarian who ‘gets it’ there are many who don’t – at least not fully and not yet.

Changing behaviours and expectations is difficult at the of best times – it is too easy to overlook the hundreds of companies that fail for every one, like Facebook or Google, that changes the landscape. In a conservative establishment like science, it’s harder still. In some ways science – as an continual, collaborative, global endeavour – is the ultimate wiki. But this analogy misleads people into assuming that adoption of new tools and approaches by scientists is a foregone conclusion. It’s not.

So will ‘early adopters’ scientists lead the rest along with them? Or will they remain as outliers? Or will they be forced back into the mainstream?

All of the above. Progress is hard, almost by definition. Often the reason is that many things have to happen to enable it: technological innovation; legal, bureaucratic and fiscal change; and behavioural adaptation. There will be many false starts, wrong turns and dead ends. As in scientific research, most ‘experiments’ in new modes of scientific communication will fail. But fortunately there will always be people testing the limits. And gradually – sometimes very gradually – the scientific mainstream will evolve.

Sometimes we get a more acute sense of how rapidly we’re moving by looking backwards rather than forwards – like looking out of the back window of a car. And just look how far we have come in less than two decades since the emergence of the first website, laughably basic by today’s standards. Inevitably, inexorably that progress is continuing. To steal a famous closing sentence:

“[F]rom so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

I just hope that all this happens at a rate much quicker than the kind of evolution that Charles Darwin was talking about.

The sort of change that these tools might engender requires use, and if scientific researcher continue to operate in closed models the availability of tools to support open discourse will not make one iota of difference. We can only hope that a new generation of scientists will approach their work with a different set of operating principles.