From industry to research, a big aspect of a career in science is being able to effectively communicate topics and ideas relevant to your field.
Our project analyzes the different ways scientific topics, specifically physical science related themes, can be communicated via social media and blog platforms.
Using three main topics and five media platforms, we aim to address some key questions in this field:
What is the most effective way of communicating science in the age of technology?
How do different social media platforms compare in terms of public engagement?
What physics topics (of the three selected) get the most/least interest and on which platform?
What factors contributed to increased/lessened interaction (e.g. clickbait, relation to well known media, jargon, etc.)?
Though efficacy of science communication is commonly reassessed with ever changing media platforms, there has been a boom in this field since the start of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic; but this has mainly been in the field of publicizing public health and biology.
Addressing how communication varies between different fields of science (i.e. public health vs. physical sciences) is the next step in assessing the overall efficacy of science communication and that is what we aim to do in this project.
Through our work, we aim to address the relationship between physics and society during this age of technology by investigating the way information is communicated in our different media platforms.
Further, we hope to assess how the public engagement in science in the media has changed from before the COVID-19 pandemic to during and after, as well as comparing viewpoints from Canada and North America to those outside.
We will use our results from this project in conjunction with various papers on science communication in both physics and other domains, from a broad range of years and countries, to assess how the public engages with science through non-conventional educational platforms.
Our group is composted of five group members, each of which was assigned to one of the following media platform: Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Tumblr, and Medium.
On said platforms, we present our three topics – Lifecycle of the Sun, The Science of Ant-Man, Why Things Never Really Touch – using different approaches and techniques to engage the target audiences.
Due to the nature of the different platforms, the delivery (e.g. post length and detail) varies between the posts; this is another factor in comparing and contrasting the different ways science is communicated in the media.
For consistency, one brief and engaging post for each topic is published weekly at 12:00 PM EST on all platforms, between March 11 and 25, 2022.
The engagement of each post is monitored daily at 9:00 PM EST during the first week after each post is published; this engagement is tracked via likes, comments, shares and reposts, where applicable.
Please refer to our
ethics statement
below for more information regarding the data being collected, how it is used and how we are accommodating the ethical implications of this study.
Further, please visit our sources page to see all the sources that have been used in this project.
We are a group of five university students studying in physics or physics related fields. We are really excited to share with you our take on complex physics topics and encourage you to actively engage in physics with us. Through this project, we hope to enhance our own understanding of these physics topics by explaining them concisely and compellingly to you, and further develop our science communication, an asset in continuing in a science-based career.
Our work involves collecting data from the analytics of our posts on the five social media platforms.
These analytics pertain to the number of likes, comments, reposts and shares, where applicable, which allows us to quantify the engagement on our posts.
Further, this data is collected anonymously. The demographic of the user engagement is not collected, simply the numbers to quantify the engagement.
The recorded analytic values are then plotted as a function of date to track the post performance across the span of a week.
This data is only collected as a means to analyze post activity and will be compared to previously done similar studies. No further work will be performed using this data.
By creating accounts on these platforms or subscribing to these blogs, you agree to the terms of service for each application.
In these terms, it is detailed that your engagement in posts on the various platforms will be shared with the original post creator and that the post engagement which is collected in this study is public information.
Below please find links to the relevant section of the terms of service for each platform:
Instagram: Section III. How is this information shared? in Instagram Data Policy.
TikTok: Section on How we share your personal data in TikTok Privacy Policy.
Twitter: Information We Share and Disclose, Section 3.5 Non-Personal Information in Twitter Privacy Policy.
Medium: Section on Sharing of Information in Medium Privacy Policy.
Tumblr: Section on What We Collect and How We Use It in Tumblr Privacy Policy.
This information being publicly avalable and collected anonymously allows this study to be exempt from the approval of the Research Ethics Board (REB) at our university insitution.
Please refer to the section on Research Exempt from REB Review
on the page dedicated to
Ethics in Human Research
on the
University of Toronto's Research Ethics Board
website,
which details
Activities Exempt from Human Ethics Review.