What makes a train ride a train ride? I regularly travel between Bangalore and Chennai, using the morning Shatabdi every time. These train rides are not easy to love even the Shatabdi’s coaches have giant glass-panelled windows that offer beautiful views at sunrise and sunset.
But the train’s features significantly dent the experience. The seats make the passenger feel like she’s on a flight: they’re arranged two and four to each side with armrests separating each one of them. The tube-lights glow flaccid white and the clientele contains a lot of the corporate class, often combining to give the impression that you’re travelling in a mobile co-working space (the only exception to this rule, from what I’ve seen, is the overnight mail).
Although quite a few families also use the train, its single-day-journey offering often means that you’ve got people travelling light, likely taking the Shatabdi back the next day or the day after, people who – in the Shatabdi’s absence – would likely have flown instead of taking a different train. The tickets aren’t cheap: between 800 and 1,100 rupees for the common class (including catering), so you’re rubbing shoulders with the relatively better off.
I don’t mean here to romanticise the often-poorer conditions in which many of India’s middle- and lower-classes travel as much as to suggest that the Shatabdi, through the Indian Railways’ efforts to offer a sanitised and expedited experience, simply ends up being clinical in its rendition. Even the Double-decker Express between Bangalore and Chennai, with a travel time only a couple hours more than that of the Shatabdi, is more germane. You’ve got tiffin-, snack- and beverage-vendors passing through the aisles every 10 minutes, the train stopping and staring every hour or so, and simply that many more people per coach that it’s compelling to pass the time in conversation with the person sitting next to you. On the Shatabdi, all you want to do is look out the window.
I really miss the trains where you sit by the window on the lower berth, looking out through the powder-blue grills at a blue sky; share food with the people around you (if you’re also carrying Imodium, i.e.); go to bed grumbling about the berths not being long or wide enough; be careful that your belongings aren’t nicked while you’re dozing; wake up at an ungodly hour to pee, finding your way through the aisle under a dark blue nightlight; and get off at whatever station amid a sea of people instead of at one relatively unpopulated end leading straight to the gate.
Travelling – even in the form of a short journey between two nearby cities – can, and ought to, be a journey of integration, whether with yourself or the world around. The Shatabdi, though a very useful service, can be potentially isolating to the frequent user. Its utilitarian nature is hard to separate from its form itself, and as a vehicle it is the perfect metaphor for all the things we find undesirable – yet necessary – in our own lives.
I strongly condemn Vinod Dua’s statements vis-à-vis the #MeToo movement and the women who have spoken up against men and toxic masculinity. This is irrespective of The Wire‘s position on this issue.
I deeply resent that Dua has been attempting to defend himself by claiming the allegations against him are efforts to malign his programme, ‘Jan Gan Man Ki Baat’, with The Wire. I hope he understands that I (and I suspect my colleagues, though I do not speak for them) will not defend him or his actions, irrespective of their legitimacy, if he cannot separate himself from his professional responsibilities.
The Wire has not succeeded in claiming ownership of the narrative with the same vehemence that Dua has demonstrated.
The moral and ethical impetus to suspend Dua became overshadowed by a processual constipation. There was no clarity on how to proceed from the beginning, and as the deliberations dragged on, I – as a member of an organisation, not as an individual – found it increasingly difficult to separate right from wrong and/or became increasingly bewildered about whether my own choices were consistently justifiable, from one day to the next. In other words, while an overarching compulsion to act against Dua persisted, I could determine neither its provenance nor its foundation.
The Dua episode highlighted a central quasi-paradox of the #MeToo movement: its calling out of the failure of due process (excluding public naming and shaming in this definition), and therefore its rejection (starting from Raya Sarkar’s List), whereas the institution/reinstitution of due process was the sole recourse readily available to many managers. This conflict is not insurmountable but it required managers – men, in most cases – to introspect through neural pathways that in many cases did not exist.
I will never understand why The Wire allowed Dua to record a video on its platform wherein he would be allowed to speak of the complaints against him. His seniority and his longstanding association with The Wire don’t matter to me and should not, in fact, to anyone in this context.
What The Wire‘s statement denouncing Dua’s words in the video has failed to mention is that the week’s time Dua set for The Wire to conduct its investigation is nonsensical insofar as it wasn’t his place to do so, and it should have been openly refuted.
To be a committed Indian left-liberal is not easy. If you are a man in particular, be ready to regularly confront – and be expected to resolve – cognitive dissonances, (inadvertent) hypocrisies and forgetfulness. If you are not familiar with the lingua franca, invest efforts to master it.
English is an artful language. It is a weapon but it is more resourceful and effective as the sallet, pauldron and sabatons within which you will always be a knight in shining armour. Learn to use it as much as to see past it.
If there is to be one concrete outcome of #MeToo as a sociopolitical movement, though I hope there is more than one, then it must be for employees at all manner of organisations to remake the work-space to eliminate these structural issues, and in the process better organise themselves as units that transcend the formal hierarchies within the organisations themselves.
For the last two nights, the skies of Bangalore have been opening up, as if for me. Last night, it poured rivers. The sky flashed with the kind of lightning that makes you say you’ve never seen lightning like that. The entire empyrean turns that electric pink that you know is all heat, blowing like canons through columns of air at the speed of sound. Seconds later, you hear it building into a crescendo into the sound of a mountain coming apart – and it pours, pours, pours, pours.
The petrichor is thick in the air, clogging your senses. Its name translates in the Greek to, roughly, “the fluid in the vein of the gods in the rocks”. Its odour is due to the presence of an alcohol, geosmin, in the soil, released by actinobacteria. We pick up on petrichor the moment it is in play because we have evolved to; we know it is going to rain when there a few parts per trillion of geosmin in the air. A biologist will tell you it is to help you find water wherever you are. I don’t think so. I think it is to help us find the storm wherever it is. We’re storm-seekers. And why not? I stand upon this crag looking at the world up on fire, the world below underwater and I, in between heaven and hell.
It is where I have always been. Satyavrata cursed, Trishanku liberated.
When thoughts turn stale, read a book. I’m reading two at the moment, which is telling.
Patriots and Partisans by historian Ram Guha, an accessible narration of the historical roots of modern Indian national politics.
Flights by Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, a work of fiction that I noticed because of its beautiful cover and then for its compelling blurb: part musings, part storytelling, on the connections between human anatomy and travelling.
I picked both these books up at the Bangalore airport after noticing an ad for Peps mattresses, and how – per the brand’s claim – it “cures jet lag”. What nonsense.
I fished my phone out of the pocket, took a picture of the banner and began to blog… noticing a couple lines later that it’s just more of the same.
Then I remembered some quote I’d read somewhere by someone famous that you can’t hope to produce good work without reading good writing. Possibly more so for someone who expresses the entirety of his creative potential through words.
So the books. Both of them are gripping – no surprises with Guha and lots of surprises with Tokarczuk. Flights‘ is an intriguing premise, you must admit. Let’s see how they go.
Oh, I also remembered a recent oped in The Hindu by Mini Kapoor, about how reading on the internet has likely diminished literate humans’ capacity for reading large texts and letting complex ideas ferment in the mind instead, as usually happens, of flitting between shorter texts and constantly recycling (allegedly original) opinions.
This isn’t an original argument. I myself have felt that Twitter – as a microblog – has probably made blogging harder.
Chennai is my favourite city to land in an airplane over.
The runway at its Meenambakkam Airport is oriented such that planes often have to land after manoeuvring themselves over the Bay of Bengal, approaching the city over the Marina beach. As a result, especially at night, it becomes evident how Chennai ‘originates’ from its port, growing from there like a seed into a tumultuous urban jungle.
The port has a pair of pincer-like structures jutting into the bay, into whose folds massive container ships – anchored offshore in the dozens – wait to arrive, conduct business and depart. The Marina, a 3.5 km long stretch of beach that abuts the port to one side, is not that brightly lit and is difficult to make out as such. However, you know you’re looking at the Marina because of the Kamarajar Promenade: 4 km long, wide, from Santhome Cathedral to the University of Madras.
Being very well lit with white LED lamps, it appears like an eidolon keeping the placidity of the beach, and the pelagic deep beyond, apart from the chaos of the city. V. Sriram, Chennai historian, writes on his blog:
The road that runs parallel to the Marina has been in existence from the mid-nineteenth century. Known earlier as South Beach Road, it was renamed Kamarajar Salai, commemorating a much-loved Chief Minister of the State. On the opposite side of the Marina came up several landmark buildings and institutions – The Madras University, Senate House, Presidency College, Chepauk Palace, the PWD Buildings, the University Examination Hall, the Ice House, Lady Willingdon Institute, Queen Mary’s College, the office of the Director-General of Police and the All India Radio. This row can be termed the cradle of the Indo-Saracenic form of architecture for it was here that, beginning with Chepauk Palace (1750s), that style was conceived, and perfected with Senate House (1860s). …
The beach also became the venue for public meetings, especially during the Freedom Struggle. Remembering this, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi sculpted by DP Roy Chowdhury, then Principal of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, was erected here in the 1950s. Another of his works on the Marina is the Triumph of Labour, inspired by the landing of American troops at Iwo Jima. In 1968 the second World Tamil Conference was held in Madras. To commemorate this, the statues of several Tamil poets, writers, literary characters and scholars were put up along the Marina. Several statues also dot the pavement opposite and one of these is of Swami Vivekananda. He stayed for a week at the Ice House – the building in which, ice, a precious commodity in hot Madras, was imported from America, stored and sold, from the 1750s till 1860! It was while walking on the Marina that Vivekananda received an inner call urging him to travel to the Parliament of Religions at Chicago. Two Chief Ministers of the State, CN Annadurai and MG Ramachandran are remembered with grand memorials on the beach. K Kamaraj, is also commemorated here by way of a statue, as is Annie Besant the Irish woman who became an Indian patriot.
There are distinct roads emerging perpendicularly from the Kamarajar Promenade and taking off into the west, away from the shore. They remain discernible for a few hundred metres or so before they dissolve into the mass of buildings around them, lost completely to the bird’s eye.
They haven’t ended, however. Some parts of Chennai were planned but most of it is not. Roads exist but they aren’t easy for the eye to follow from a metal container flying at 250 km/hr a few thousand feet up in the air. They are best followed with legs as they turn this way and that, feeding all parts of an old city with people and goods.
For example, though I don’t go out much, I was able to identify at least four roads that Google Maps didn’t know were there in the few months I lived in Chennai last year.
Bangalore and Delhi, on the other hand, because they’re not coastal, offer something much less sudden and also much less sublime. The lack of sublimity is especially true of Bangalore, a city surrounded by hundreds of lakes. As you come within some 500 km of it, numerous lakes dot the land, and you know the city is about to begin when they appear to shrivel up like dried grapes. It’s an ugly sight.
Delhi is an urban sprawl that begins and ends, from the aircraft’s perspective, in the middle of nowhere. However, window-side passengers do catch a glimpse of the anaemic Yamuna to one side of the city, its surface changing from a deep blue one minute to a murky brown the next.
This isn’t to say Chennai has not uglified the land and ecosystems around it. The serenity of ships off of the Marina is a thin veil over a neritic zone ravaged by trawlers. The Adyar river is barely visible and fares worse than the Yamuna. Landfills to the north and south have destroyed marshland and almost all of the city’s south has been built over a natural drainage system.
In fact, a view of Chennai at night masks these concerns because what you see is effectively an economic map of the city – a map of what deserves to be lit at night and what is lit more brightly than others. In the 21st century, cities are conceived as economic engines, and they are exposed best when everything uncommercial around them has retired for the day.
However, Chennai was born in the 17th century. So when you land over it at night, the darkness may not be a void as much as a part of the city that has endured for almost 380 years. On my next trip, I’ll look out for those spots.
Featured image: A satellite’s view of Chennai at night. Credit: NASA.
I just got to Delhi from Bangalore. The sendoff in the latter city was great: the skies were overcast, with a darker, wetter layer of clouds looming at the zenith, set at snail’s pace by a strong wind. Delhi wasn’t too bad either. If there was no haze, the sky would probably look like it did in Bangalore, sans the wind. (N. just mentioned that it hadn’t been raining for the last three days or so, but then it began to pour an hour after I reached. I’m more convinced now that I, like Rob McKenna, bring the rain.)
I generally like cloudy weather, and the rain too if I have shelter from it (and don’t have to travel within the city). In fact, going one step meta, I generally like diffuse over direct sunlight and – like most other city-dwellers in Chennai or Delhi, presumably – an ambient temperature below 30º C. The former preference is the more interesting to me, and I thought about it during my recent trip to Coorg (where the same weather conditions prevailed).
What’s the difference between the two forms of natural lighting? Direct sunlight casts darker shadows and is quite warm to the touch. But more importantly, it creates a stronger sense of the passage of time as those shadows shift during the day. With diffuse sunlight, however, time often appears to have stilled. If the cloud cover causing the diffusion is dense enough, then all the available sunlight appears to come from all directions irrespective of the Sun’s position in the sky, except of course at dawn and dusk. This is also why diffusion caused by atmospheric haze is not pleasing: the particulate matter scatters all of the heat whereas clouds reflect out a lot of it.
Overcast days make for the weather worth writing in, with a light that is not too hard on the eyes even as it illuminates the world. It doesn’t wash over in a photonic bleach over leaves, making them yellower than they appear to be. Instead, it holds them gently by the arm and guides them out of the darkness, to display their shades of green as they would like to. It doesn’t break up the ground into misshapen light and dark patches with stark boundaries, preferring to render a fluid blend of white and grey upon which the eye can cruise at ease.
It doesn’t invade the world and remake it in its luminescence but simply softens its glare upon the writer’s eye, letting her mind, fingers and pen work the magic she searches for.
(Re)Stumbled upon this article, by Ed Yong in The Atlantic, July 2016, this morning. As usual, it is rivetingly packaged. The strapline in particular caught my eye:
Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong.
Makes you go “Wow”, doesn’t it? But then you read the article and realise the strap is not entirely right. Lichens are still symbiotic unions of fungi and algae; the new finding is that there are two types of fungi involved, not one. You realise it’s the sort of blurb that only a pedantic biologist might be able to defend, or the sort of blurb most readers could be expected to gloss over because the article’s author is Ed Yong.
I would never have used this strapline to describe the story. Instead, here’s the one we did use for Nandita Jayaraj’s story on the same topic:
Lichens are the most famous and successful examples of symbiosis on Earth, but an unexpected discovery of a third player in this composite organism has given their study a much needed jolt.
As R. Prasad, the science editor of The Hindu, says,
The heading is the first opportunity to attract the reader's attention. The sub-heading (technically called a head deck or blurb) provides some more info about the article to get the reader interested in the article and start reading. (1/2)
… the strapline (or deck) together with the headline makes the sales pitch to the reader for her time. The headline is often the sole bit of metadata that will be most visible on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and is the one that’ll be most commonly shared (my guess). This way, the headline makes the all-important elevator pitch to bring the reader off of her platform and onto our site. Once she’s here, the strapline makes a more extended pitch to get her to start reading the body.
For curiosity gap headlines, the strapline often heightens the curiosity instead of fulfilling it. This is also true in the Ed Yong article: the headline makes you wonder what bit of biology was overturned; the strapline takes over from there, focuses your imagination into the niche, and still keeps you wondering (not necessarily about the same thing). The question here to me is whether it’s okay to be only technically right in the strapline because it’s still part of the inverted pyramid, where you can get away with making generalisations at the top as you funnel the reader’s curiosity into more specific niches below.
As a prolific consumer of science writing both fab and crap, The Atlantic‘s strap is not good enough for me; it’s a letdown. While Yong does a typically good job of dramatising the reveal, it pales in comparison to what the strap seemed to suggest. Such a description would be par for the course on, say, the Times of India, but I would expect much better from The Atlantic. It often feels like the smaller publishers are held to higher standards than the bigger ones, and in this sense The Atlantic certainly towers over The Wire.
I got into fantasy because my reality growing up was no good. The first videogame I played and really enjoyed, almost to the point of obsessing over it every available second, was Command & Conquer’s Red Alert 2. I believe many players of the game will agree it was one of the best games of its genre – 2.5D military strategy – ever made, even to this day, over 20 years after it was first released. In fact, _Red Alert_ 3, which features better graphics and more detailed gameplay, is widely considered to have missed the allure of its king-sized predecessor.
However, RA2 is not the game I continue to obsess about in 2018, over a decade after having first played it. That (dubious) distinction belongs to Warcraft, especially World of Warcraft (the MMORPG). I’ve played a good bit of WoW (but not so much of Defence of the Ancients, the multiplayer arena), and what keeps drawing me to it is the expansive lore underlying the game’s structure, gameplay and expansion since it was first released in 2004. I wouldn’t be so foolish to claim I’m the greatest fan of the world of Azeroth, where the game’s story is set, if only because this world has so many fans.
To the uninitiated: There are three main factions at play through the entire series – the Horde, the Alliance and the Burning Legion. The Horde and the Alliance are two factions that are native to Azeroth and are frequently fighting with each other. The Burning Legion is an army of demons led by Sargeras, a fallen titan, and a mantle of dreadlords; it wants to extinguish all life in the universe. When the Legion comes to Azeroth, the Horde and the Alliance must put aside their conflicts and protect their world from the demonic forces.
This very simple and emimently trope-filled story has been shaped quite smartly in the last two and half decades, although Blizzard, the game’s maker, has occasionally taken its audience for granted. For those who want to know more about the lore, the WoW Wiki is a fantastic resource. There’s no one way to enter its network of stories and motivations because it has become so labyrinthine over the years. Even the chronological order won’t do because there is a lot of back and forth between multiple plotlines. On the plus side, you can start anywhere and just keep jumping from page to page.
Fortunately for newcomers, the cinematic trailers Blizzard has produced to introduce each expansion of the game to players can serve like a table of contents. After WoW was first released, there have been seven expansions for a total of eight trailers. The production quality on each of these trailers is very high. The animation is slick, the storytelling is tight but, most of all, each trailer does a stellar job of setting the mood for what’s to come. (Gamers may or may not internalise this mood but as an aspiring lore-master, I certainly do.)
The trailers are:
1. World of Warcraft Introduces the basic races and the world of Azeroth
2. Burning Crusade Introduction to Illidan Stormrage, one of the more interesting actors in the lore, fitting the “misunderstood pseudo-bad guy willing to do anything to protect the good guys” trope. This is also the first time WoW fans hear his famous line, “You are not prepared!”
3. Wrath of the Lich King [My favourite trailer] Shows Arthas Menethil merging with the Lich King as the former awakens from the Frozen Throne, the power of his sword Frostmourne, and suggests his soon-to-begin quest to be king of Lordaeron (where Arthas was earlier a lawful-good prince).
Aside: Illidan and Arthas have similar stories: both of them loved their homes dearly and went to great lengths to protect it, ultimately sacrificing themselves. However, this expansion depicted Arthas as being more powerful than Illidan, an idea I could never get behind because Illidan had a more mature vision of the future and his role in it, always seemed to be more aware of his strengths and weaknesses, and was always fighting for a greater goal.
4. Cataclysm This is when Blizzard was going nowhere with the plot and fans were growing frustrated. So the makers drastically reshaped Azeroth by having an ancient and powerful dragon break free from its prison deep in the world, flying to the world on the surface and setting the skies on fire.
5. Mists of Pandaria [My least favourite trailer] An orc and a human warrior are shipwrecked on a seemingly unexplored island. As they begin to fight each other, they are interrupted by a mysterious, quick-footed, mist-cloaked fighter wielding a long bamboo stick. As he bests them both and pushes them back every time they engage, the human and the orc team up against what is soon revealed to be… a panda. All this time, the panda – rather, pandaren – has been talking in the voiceover in a Chinese accent about how their goal is to “preserve balance and bring harmony”. *retch*
6. Warlords of Draenor Jumps back 35 years to reveal how the dreadlords’ scheme to enslave the orcs came undone. This section was not very well-received because it was an alternative timeline that changed the story of Gul’dan, one of the primary orcish antagonists of the series, in ways that made him seem less complicated as a villain than he was in the Warcraft (the video game, not the MMORPG) timeline. His arc also continued into the next expansion, Legion.
7. Legion Varian Wrynn and Sylvanas Windrunner fight together against the Burning Legion, which is now trying to open the Tomb of Sargeras and bring its supreme leader into the world. The trailer has some funny scenes (such as Varian striking a heroic pose as he jumps out of the water and takes on fel-beasts while the viewer realises the water had to have been only about two feet deep there). It also doesn’t spell out the expansion’s full story, which has many twists.
8. Battle for Azeroth Like Star Wars, WoW comes a full circle with this expansion, taking a break from the inventive turns of its predecessors and reintroducing an old conflict in an attempt to put the franchise on familiar, stable ground: the Alliance and the Horde are at each other’s throats again. Sylvanas and Varian’s son Anduin are seen fighting on opposite sides.
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I’m not fond of the trailers apart from the one for the ‘Wrath of the Lich King’ because they seem to display many of the stereotypes of our reality, and which fantasy is usually expected to defy. For example, though Azeroth’s technology may indicate its society is similar to that in medieval England, there’s no reason the humans – rather the Alliance – should eventually be led by a white man (Anduin Wrynn) carrying a sword that draws its authority from the heavens. In fact, a significant portion of the non-white races in WoW are cast as evil or misguided.
For another example, almost all the violence in the game – and the consequent disruption of natural order, whether of history or of place – is led by male fighters. The sole major exception to this was Queen Azshara’s betrayal that first invited the Burning Legion to Azeroth. On the flip-side, the restoration of order meant the restoration of a monarchy, typically led by a king (not queen). Again, the sole major exception was Sylvanas’s anointment as warchief of the Horde by Vol’jin, that too only because the spirits had asked him to. Azeroth may be an imperfect world but it didn’t have to be so in ways so closely mirroring reality.
I never got into playing WoW as much as I did reading about it. My two roommates in senior year of college would play it almost 24/7, getting up only to go to the bathroom. I played a little bit after college but couldn’t take to it. The gameplay is rich, complex, offering each player multiple ways to accrue resources, assimilate them and develop their characters. Although teamwork is mandatory to complete WoW’s bigger in-game tasks, players have been able to find a formulaic way of doing things after running through each task repeatedly, perfecting their sequence of actions until they’ve found perfection.
I miss those days from time to time, when Warcraft lore was all that passed as conversation between friends.
Featured image: The Lich King from World of Warcraft. Source: YouTube.
A lightning storm rages outside. The large window panes going from floor to ceiling in the living room rattle as the wind whips around, gathering dust off the ground right outside my building, spinning it up into little, but no less terrifying, tornadoes (maybe it’s the tornado-like action of the wind that’s terrifying; you never know what’s going to happen next) that reach up five or six stories high, lit up by dispassionate sodium-vapour lamps. I can see the eagle that usually leisurely stalks the skies at this hour struggling to find a current it can cruise in, instead being forced to glide along what guiderails of wind it can find.
The muffled sound of rain like white noise floats in from all sides, percolating through the walls, rising one minute and falling the next. The incessant flashes of lightning portend the next rumbling roll of thunder, lighting up the sky in ultra-bright flares of white before the heavens return to their dark pink-red, a horizon-spanning wound preparing to be cauterised once more.
It’s so wonderfully easy to sit inside during these moments and marvel at the casual but preconceived display of power all around. What must it have been like four billion years ago, when the first microbes were taking shape and suddenly the world around them was ablaze with electric discharges, the air itself on fire? What must it have been like when the first creatures with ears were assailed by thunder, when the first creatures with eyes were blinded by the light? When the first humans felt as if the sky was exploding and crashing down around them?
It wasn’t until the eighteenth century that we figured out lightning was electricity – but the moment we did, we cast our now-knowing eye back into the recesses of time, looked at the first sensing lifeforms of Earth and wondered what fantasies they conjured in their laughable ignorance. Just the way after some lightning storm of the future, some slouch will look back to this night and wonder what fantasies we were mulling in the middle of a lightning storm.
In an effort to better understand the science information that social media users encounter on these platforms, Pew Research Center systematically analyzed six months’ worth of posts from 30 of the most followed science-related pages on Facebook. These science-related pages included 15 popular Facebook accounts from established “multiplatform” organizations … along with 15 popular “Facebook-primary” accounts from individuals or organizations that have a large social media presence on the platform but are not connected to any offline, legacy outlet.
Is popularity the best way to judge if a Facebook page counts as a page about science? Popularity is an easy measure but it often almost exclusively represents a section of the ‘market’ skewed towards popular science. Some such pages from the Pew dataset include facebook.com/healthdigest, /mindbodygreen, /DailyHealthTips, /DavidAvocadoWolfe and /droz – all “wellness” brands that may not represent the publication of scientific content as much as, more broadly, content that panders to a sense of societal insecurity that is not restricted to science. This doesn’t limit the Pew study insofar as the study aims to elucidate what passes off as ‘science’ on Facebook but it does limit Pew’s audience-specific insights.
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… just 29% of the [6,528] Facebook posts from these pages [published in the first half of 2017] had a focus or “frame” around information about new scientific discoveries.
Not sure why the authors, Paul Hitlin and Kenneth Olmstead, think this is “just” 29% – that’s quite high! Science is not just about new research and research results, and if these pages are consciously acknowledging that on average limiting their posts about such news to three of every 10 posts, that’s fantastic. (Of course, if the reason for not sharing research results is that they’re not very marketable, that’s too bad.)
I’m also curious about what counts as research on the “wellness” pages. If their posts share research to a) dismiss it because it doesn’t fit the page authors’ worldview or b) popularise studies that are, say, pursuing a causative link between coffee consumption and cancer, then such data is useless.
From ‘The science people see on social media’. Credit: Pew Research Center
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The volume of posts from these science-related pages has increased over the past few years, especially among multiplatform pages. On average, the 15 popular multiplatform Facebook pages have increased their production of posts by 115% since 2014, compared with a 66% increase among Facebook-primary pages over the same time period. (emphasis in the original)
The first line in italics is a self-fulfilling prophecy, not a discovery. This is because the “multiplatform organisations” chosen by Pew for analysis all need to make money, and all organisations that need to continue making money need to grow. Growth is not an option, it’s a necessity, and it often implies growth on all platforms of publication in quantity and (hopefully) quality. In fact, the “Facebook-primary” pages, by which Hitlin and Olmstead mean “accounts from individuals or organizations that have a large social media presence on the platform but are not connected to any offline, legacy outlet”, are also driven to grow for the same reason: commerce, both on Facebook and off. As the authors write,
Across the set of 30 pages, 16% of posts were promotional in nature. Several accounts aimed a majority of their posts at promoting other media and public appearances. The four prominent scientists among the Facebook-primary pages posted fewer than 200 times over the course of 2017, but when they did, a majority of their posts were promotions (79% of posts from Dr. Michio Kaku, 78% of posts from Neil deGrasse Tyson, 64% of posts from Bill Nye and 58% of posts from Stephen Hawking). Most of these were self-promotional posts related to television appearances, book signings or speeches.
A page with a few million followers is likelier than not to be a revenue-generating exercise. While this is by no means an indictment of the material shared by these pages, at least not automatically, IFL Science is my favourite example: its owner Elise Andrews was offered $30 million for the page in 2015. I suspect that might’ve been a really strong draw to continue growing, and unfortunately, many of the “Facebook-primary” pages like IFLS find this quite easy to do by sharing well-dressed click-bait.
Second, if Facebook is the primary content distribution channel, then the number of video posts will also have shown an increase in the Pew data – as it did – because publishers both small and large that’ve made this deal with the devil have to give the devil whatever it wants. If Facebook says videos are the future and that it’s going to tweak its newsfeed algorithms accordingly, publishers are going to follow suit.
Source: Pew Research Center
So when Hitlin and Olmstead say, “Video was a common feature of these highly engaging posts whether they were aimed at explaining a scientific concept, highlighting new discoveries, or showcasing ways people can put science information to use in their lives”, they’re glossing over an important confounding factor: the platform itself. There’s a chance Facebook is soon going to say VR is the next big thing, and then there’s going to be a burst of posts with VR-mediated content. But that doesn’t mean the publishing houses themselves believe VR is good or bad for sharing science news.
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The average number of user interactions per post – a common indicator of audience engagement based on the total number of shares, comments, and likes or other reactions – tends to be higher for posts from Facebook-primary accounts than posts from multiplatform accounts. From January 2014 to June 2017, Facebook-primary pages averaged 14,730 interactions per post, compared with 4,265 for posts on multiplatform pages. This relationship held up even when controlling for the frame of the post. (emphasis in the original)
Again, Hitlin and Olmstead refuse to distinguish between ‘legitimate’ posts and trash. This would involve a lot more work on their part, sure, but it would also make their insights into science consumption on the social media that much more useful. But until then, for all I know, “the average number of user interactions per post … tends to be higher for posts from Facebook-primary accounts than posts from multiplatform accounts” simply because it’s Gwyneth Paltrow wondering about what stones to shove up which orifices.
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… posts on Facebook-primary pages related to federal funding for agencies with a significant scientific research mission were particularly engaging, averaging more than 122,000 interactions per post in the first half of 2017.
Now that’s interesting and useful. Possible explanation: Trump must’ve been going nuts about something science-related. [Later in the report] Here it is: “Many of these highly engaging posts linked to stories suggesting Trump was considering a decrease in science-agency funding. For example, a Jan. 25, 2017, IFLScience post called Trump’s Freeze On EPA Grants Leaves Scientists Wondering What It Means was shared more than 22,000 times on Facebook and had 62,000 likes and other reactions.”
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Highly engaging posts among these pages did not always feature science-related information. Four of the top 15 most-engaging posts from Facebook-primary pages featured inspirational sayings or advice such as “look after your friends” or “believe in yourself.”
Does mental-health-related messaging on the back of new findings or realisations about the need for, say, speaking out on depression and anxiety count as science communication? It does to me; by all means, it’s “news I can use”.
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Three of the Facebook-primary pages belong to prominent astrophysicists. Not surprisingly, about half or more of the posts on these pages were related to astronomy or physics: Dr. Michio Kaku (58%), Stephen Hawking (58%) and Neil deGrasse Tyson (48%).
Ha! It would be interesting to find out why science’s most prominent public authority figures in the last few decades have all been physicists of some kind. I already have some ideas but that’ll be a different post.
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Useful takeaways for me as science editor, The Wire:
Pages that stick to a narrower range of topics do better than those that cover all areas of science
Controversial topics such as GMOs “didn’t appear often” on the 30 pages surveyed – this is surprising because you’d think divisive issues would attract more audience engagement. However, I also imagine the pages’ owners might not want to post on those issues to avoid flame wars (😐), stay away from inconclusive evidence (😄), not have to take a stand that might hurt them (🤔) or because issue-specific nuances make an issue a hard-sell (🙄).
Most posts that shared discoveries were focused on “energy and environment, geology, and archeology”; half of all posts about physics and astronomy were about discoveries
Metastable 