Have your say
Commentary on the Internet is notoriously stupid. Pick pretty much any Youtube video and you will see questions being asked about the content which is clearly answered in the description on the right-hand side, or at best a simple Google away. And then asked again. And then asked again. Or you may encounter trolling in its most basic form, where people sitting in front of computer screens freed from their built-in social constraints of politeness and fear of reprisals unleash pure vitriol in the form of typing before they’ve had any time to think. People’s genuine opinions approach sheer ridiculousness in these situations. Indeed, Poe’s Law of the Internet states that “Without a winking smily or other blatant display of humour it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing. “Speak you’re branes” is a good example of a blog (there are others) which is dedicated to offering up the prime cuts of un-thought-through commentary from the dregs of the Internet.
PHD comics have produced a comic imagining if academic process was as free and open as this. What if half of the comments included “LOL” or “ROFL” in them or had far too many exclamation marks? What if people merely commented to try to direct traffic to their own website (or academic work)? What if all the rest of the comments were by semi-literate conspiracy theorists or spammers? Interestingly, this is partially the way scientific peer review is headed. In some journals, peer review is already done entirely online. The Lancet, for example, uses one page with simple instructions for the submission of all papers including correspondence. Peer review is then done by experts in the field who will not be told whom they are reviewing, although in some cases they may have a very good idea. Funny as it may seem, but that’s exactly the way peer review appears to be heading. Scientific peer review will continue to be necessary for respectability. Many different publishers of academic journals are encouraging you to bookmark their articles.
Back in the bad old days of web 1.0, if you liked a website you would add it to your bookmarks or favourites so you could return to it later. There would be no way of knowing if it had been updated other than to return to it, and if your hard drive broke then you would lose all your links. Online bookmarking is the web 2.0 equivalent of this. Links are saved to Automating posting of an article to these services has taken off in all kinds of websites and blogs. Even Google Reader is now trying to integrate a degree of sociability into its automated looking through lots and lots websites by enabling users to “like” posts to allow other users to see what’s popular, and for people to be able to make a statement about what they like and have people “follow” them. As persistent use of the Internet is now deemed normal and socially acceptable
CiteULike, Complore, Connotea specialise in bookmarking and working together on journals and other resources related to academia, but other services which are used by mere mortals are often linked to, including Delicious, Digg, Reddit, Technorati, Facebook and Twitter. Yes, Twitter. I never thought I’d see the day when reputable journals would be encouraging you to share papers at the click of a button on Twitter. Shame it’s blocked in so many NHS trusts. I don’t think there’s going to be much success in a strategy of pointing out the education value of Twitter to Trust administrators for the time being. Maybe in a few years. In a few years, everyone will probably have a Blackberry, iPhone or equivalent so what the Trust decide to block will be moot.
- Dom
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Clinical Medicine.
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