In what follows I wish to briefly discuss some ideas that came to me while reading the seven papers in the series ‘Social Media Trends in Medical History’. It would be impossible, in the space allotted to me, to adequately discuss the majority of the insights and experiences the authors offer. I thus urge interested readers to engage directly with the original papers.
In August 1991, Tim Berners-Lee gave the public access to the first World Wide Web server and the WWW was born. This initial version of the Web was very different from what we see today. In the early years, passive readers consumed static content, generated by a few actors and placed on servers by dedicated webmasters. Over time, Web 1.0 – as it was retroactively termed – gave way to Web 2.0, an ecosystem in which readers actively participate in knowledge generation and critique.Footnote 1 This Internet gave us the social media we know today, where sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia (to name but a few) allow readers not only to comment on, but also to interactively create, content. Like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Web just ‘grow’d’.
Nowhere is this transition from ‘passive’ to ‘active’ consumption more apparent than in the development of Wikipedia. The roots of Wikipedia lie in Nupedia, an earlier attempt to make knowledge freely available to non-specialists. Built on a traditional academic model, Nupedia’s reliance on editors, peer-reviewers, experts and a seven stage review process slowed the development of entries so that between March 2000 and September 2003, a mere twenty-five complete articles were available online for passive consumption by the general public.Footnote 2 Wikipedia came into being in January 2001 as an attempt to accelerate this editorial process. By the end of the year, Wikipedia offered approximately 20 000 articles (albeit of varying quality). By 2003, Nupedia had been overtaken by its fertile offspring, and the site was shuttered.Footnote 3
The roundtable that generated the papers in the ‘Social Media Trends in Medical History’ series would not have been conceivable a decade ago, when social media was in its infancy. Facebook was founded in 2004 and was initially geared towards college students. Twitter would not appear until two years later. The reach of these two technologies alone is astounding. Twitter has 274 million users, an impressive number that is overshadowed by the 1.28 billion users who use Facebook.Footnote 4 These numbers speak to the first of two themes contained within this series of papers that I wish to address: the broadening of both contributors and audiences that these technologies allow.
With regards to broadening of contributors, Katherine Bachynski has recounted how Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger at The Atlantic, has successfully leveraged his audience to obtain ‘information about a topic he is unfamiliar with, placing current events in historical context, and structuring conversations around particular primary or secondary texts’.Footnote 5 In so doing, he received feedback from professionals and amateurs, with many comments providing un-sourced information that required subsequent verification. That said, Coates clearly provided a forum where knowledge production and consumption was being democratised to a degree. It strikes me that there are two things at work here – firstly, the appeal to a (virtual) audience for information and, secondly, the engagement between professionals and the public (or specialists and non-specialists, if you prefer). Of course, one can do one without the other. Recently I asked my Facebook audience for literature on the history of the development of pharmaceuticals targeted to specific racial groups. Within minutes, historians whom I knew professionally were providing me with information and – in many ways more importantly – tagging other historians whom I did not know and asking them to provide more information. Within the space of thirty minutes I had amassed an eleven-page bibliography. Such is the power of social media crowd-sourcing even with a strictly professional community.
The second area is the broadening of audience. Many readers may contribute to the comments section on a blog post, but experience shows that the vast majority do not. The same holds for tweets. However, although passive, these readers are affected in some way by the information they receive and often choose to share. Given that the sharing mechanisms built into social media allow for rapid dispersal of a post/tweet/update, one’s ideas can quickly spread into a different and often more diverse community. In this way, it may make sense to talk of multiple audiences for a piece of information. An academic who uses social media will, without fail, end up reaching a broad and diverse, non-specialist, audience.
In a 2008 essay, historian Graeme Gooday and his co-authors (of which I was one) asked ‘what can historians of science add to this public discourse about science education? Obviously they can provide historical analyses that place current public and scientific controversies in perspective. Equally important, they can correct misguided attempts at revisionist history that misinform the public about science’.Footnote 6 Currently public controversies exist about topics such as climate change, the safety of vaccination, the use of stem cells, and the possibility of human cloning. Historians and social scientists have studied the development of the scientific status quo on these and other issues. To borrow a phrase from Nathaniel Comfort, the opportunity now exists through social media to contribute ‘serious history to public discussions’Footnote 7 and to reach an audience that would have been unheard of a decade ago.Footnote 8
Emerging from these two themes is a third one: the ability to create non-standard historical narratives. As Clarissa Lee notes, social media can be ‘a form of outreach on history of science at the margins’.Footnote 9 Broadening of both contributors and audiences inevitably leads to the inclusion of marginal or previously hidden voices and challenges to traditional historical narratives.
Despite the diversity of social media, two appear – to me at least – to be the most used: blogging and Twitter. They are, of course, two very different modes of discourse, the former allowing for more thoughtful, longer writing while the latter seems to encourage more immediate and gnomic expression. Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi has described her experiences tweeting at conferences while Luis Campos discusses the value of reading tweets that originate from a conference that one is (or is not) attending.Footnote 10 Indeed a literature is beginning to form about the utility of Twitter in such academic sessions.Footnote 11 Clarissa Lee gives examples of Twitter accounts being used to bring historical personages to life. There are other things one can do with Twitter. For example, Amy Shira Teitel (an historian of space flight, @astVintageSpace) ‘live’ tweeted the moon landing of Apollo 11 in July 2014. It is probably only a matter of time before some intrepid soul tweets Charles Darwin’s voyage on H.M.S. Beagle!
Luis Campos raises some interesting questions regarding audience and privacy. Are speakers to assume that their words – spoken in a closed conference room – are being communicated to a worldwide audience? Should tweeters explicitly ask for permission to broadcast a given talk? Should societies develop policies on social media use at their conferences? There appears to be a whole bundle of issues that need to be untangled.
As Campos notes, the Library of Congress is archiving tweets in an effort to preserve these ephemeral productions. Yet this may not be enough for future historians. Many tweets provide links to further content, be it a webpage or image. Often this content link is shortened using a service such as Ow.ly. A future historian will face a number of problems. (1) If the shortening service is not active, how can she decode the link? (2) Even if it is still active, will the website hosting the content still exist? (3) If the website exists, will the content still exist? Lastly, (4) will the content be machine-readable? In an ideal world, all of the Internet could be archived. At the risk of taking this line of thought too far, I would just note that such a Library of Internet Content would require archiving of programs to read the content and thus also machines to run those programs. It may be that, in the future, the text of a tweet is decipherable, but what it refers to is unknowable. But perhaps I am worrying too much.Footnote 12
Durability and privacy are not the only aspects of social media that can be problematic. Sean Cosgrove nicely points out some of the responsibilities that come with using social media and specifically mentions ‘maintaining is a collegial and productive digital space’.Footnote 13 As anyone who has spent time on social media can relate, discussions held without moderation can often devolve into non-collegial, non-productive arguments. As a number of authors have noted, moderation of comments is time-consuming and indeed many bloggers do not allow any comments on their posts, thus perhaps weighing civility against broadening of participation. It is also worth noting that use of social media by academics has increasingly – in the United States at least – come under the scrutiny of administrators raising the issue of freedom of speech particularly in relation to statements regarding controversial non-academic topics.Footnote 14
It is hard to imagine that Berners-Lee could have foreseen how his brainchild would develop and what it would allow participants to create and share. The increased availability of tablet computers and smart phones has allowed information producers to slip the bonds of the desktop and to be able to work in non-traditional ways, places and times. What the future holds for social media is practically impossible to predict, but one can certainly say that it is here to stay within the academy.
