Social Media and the Production of Knowledge: A Return to Little Science?

Abstract

In the classic study Little science, big science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Derek Price traces the historical shift from what he calls little science—exemplified by early‐modern “invisible colleges” of scientific amateurs and enthusiasts engaged in small‐scale, informal interactions and personal correspondence—to 20th‐century big science, dominated by professional scientists and wealthy institutions, where scientific information (primarily in print form and its analogues) was mass‐produced, marketed and circulated on a global scale. This article considers whether the growing use of more participatory, interactive “Web 2.0” technologies and social media in science today (e.g. wikis, blogs, tagging and bookmarking, conferencing, etc.) may signal a revival of little science modes of communication that contrast with big science conventions that continue to dominate research policy, scientific institutions, and the publishing industry. A brief historical review of responses to the scientific “information explosion” since the early 1900s is presented, with a particular focus on the idealization of large‐scale, automated information systems and the privileging of formal (document‐producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication. Alternative frameworks for scientific communication that incorporate both documents and interaction are used to examine contemporary examples of so‐called Science 2.0 and citizen science projects to determine whether such projects indicate the emergence of new modes of communication in science that bridge the immediacy and involvement of invisible colleges and the rigor of peer‐reviewed publishing. The implications for traditional documentary forms such as the journal article are also discussed.

Keywords:

• Scientific Communication
• Web 2.0
• Citizen Science
• Social Media
• Invisible Colleges

Notes

[1] The neologism “collaboratory” was coined in the late 1980s to describe platforms for collaborative scientific work that allow participants to share data and documents, interact with one another, and have remote access to instrumentation and facilities at partner locations via networked computing and telecommunications systems (Finholt 2002; Finholt and Olson 1997; Lederberg and Uncapher 1989; Wulf 1993). Thanks to hypertext protocols, high‐speed networks and the World Wide Web, today’s Internet‐based collaborations enjoy far more sophisticated interfaces and access to resources and interested colleagues. However, the principle behind today’s collaboratories is essentially the same as when such projects were proposed over 20 years ago (Pepe 2010).

[2] Our stages correspond roughly with a model proposed at about the same time by Arie Rip (1990), who described stages of researching, scientizing, and politicking—although our framework focused more on technologies (particularly telecommunications), and Rip’s focused more on the political and power implications of communication in science.

[3] This project also incorporated the Genome@home project, which was discontinued in 2004. See Beberg et al. (2009), and the Wikipedia entry “Genome@home” available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome@home; INTERNET.