Speed of information transfer: There’s good reason to believe that social media rapidly increases the speed at which science can be disseminated. Ideally, this increases the rate of medical discovery by a) making us aware of what others are doing and that we can build on and b) exposing us to alternative approaches and methods from other disciplines that we can integrate into our own work. I’ve certainly benefitted greatly from being exposed to ‘random’ articles from other fields.
Epistemic disorientation: In contrast to the first point, there are potentially negative effects of social media on both the rate and direction of discovery. For example, one the main issues with social media is that we can end up inducing a type of epistemic disorientation, where there is simply too much information to make sense of anything. We experienced some of this during COVID-19, where the amount of (contrasting) information that was being published ultimately confused us more than it provided clarity. Downstream consequences of this are that we end up having to conduct research to disprove the opinions of others, rather than doing it for any scientific reasons. Various conspiracy theories circulating online, such as the link between vaccination and autism, could also waste research resources.
Hype: Social media could also overhype certain treatments (e.g., Wegovy at the moment). This could result in disproportionate amounts of funding going towards ‘trendy’ research areas, meaning that resources are detracted from potentially more pressing health areas. In the book I call this ‘scientific bubbles’, where too much capital is concentrated in a small research area; the fear is, of course, that our expectations fail to materialize – resulting in a bubble burst of confidence and a loss of public trust in science.
Definitely many other ways—but these three come to mind most immediately!
Speed of information transfer: There’s good reason to believe that social media rapidly increases the speed at which science can be disseminated. Ideally, this increases the rate of medical discovery by a) making us aware of what others are doing and that we can build on and b) exposing us to alternative approaches and methods from other disciplines that we can integrate into our own work. I’ve certainly benefitted greatly from being exposed to ‘random’ articles from other fields.
Epistemic disorientation: In contrast to the first point, there are potentially negative effects of social media on both the rate and direction of discovery. For example, one the main issues with social media is that we can end up inducing a type of epistemic disorientation, where there is simply too much information to make sense of anything. We experienced some of this during COVID-19, where the amount of (contrasting) information that was being published ultimately confused us more than it provided clarity. Downstream consequences of this are that we end up having to conduct research to disprove the opinions of others, rather than doing it for any scientific reasons. Various conspiracy theories circulating online, such as the link between vaccination and autism, could also waste research resources.
Hype: Social media could also overhype certain treatments (e.g., Wegovy at the moment). This could result in disproportionate amounts of funding going towards ‘trendy’ research areas, meaning that resources are detracted from potentially more pressing health areas. In the book I call this ‘scientific bubbles’, where too much capital is concentrated in a small research area; the fear is, of course, that our expectations fail to materialize – resulting in a bubble burst of confidence and a loss of public trust in science.
Definitely many other ways—but these three come to mind most immediately!