Science blogging: Networks, boundaries and limitations

Abstract

There is limited research into the realities of science blogging, how science bloggers themselves view their activity and what bloggers can achieve. The ‘badscience’ blogs analysed here show a number of interesting developments, with significant implications for understandings of science blogging and scientific cultures more broadly. A functioning and diverse online community (with offline elements) has been constructed, with a number of non-professional and anonymous members and with boundary work being used to establish a recognisable outgroup. The community has developed distinct norms alongside a type of distributed authority and has negotiated the authority, anonymity and varying status of many community members in some interesting and novel ways. Activist norms and initiatives have been actioned, with some prominent community campaigns and action. There are questions about what science blogging—both in the UK and internationally—may be able to achieve in future and about the fragility of the ‘badscience’ community. Some of the highly optimistic hopes which have been associated with science blogging have not been realised. Nonetheless, the small group of bloggers focused on here have produced significant achievements with limited resources, especially when one considers this in the context of community values as opposed to some of the expectations attached to science blogging within scientific cultures more broadly. While the impacts of this science blogging community remain uncertain, the novel and potentially significant practices analysed here do merit serious consideration.