Colloquium: Inside a communication revolution: Science, blogs, and the public

Scientific communication is currently undergoing a revolution, with individual citizens, as bloggers, being able to claim an increasingly influential role. Without any official endorsement or funding, based purely on their own motivation and interests, some bloggers have quite literally shifted the course of (scientific) history. This is nowhere more apparent than in the area of climate change, where a Canadian blogger has triggered two Congressional enquiries in the U.S. and has recently testified in front of a parliamentary committee in the U.K. Notwithstanding the undeniable importance of bloggers, next to nothing is known about how blogs “work” and why and how they attract so much public attention. Australia has at least three climate blogs that communicate the peer-reviewed science or seek to debunk climate “scepticism”. One of those influential websites, with more than 10,000 visitors a day, is www.skepticalscience.com. John Cook is the blogger responsible for this website and also various “apps” for mobile phones and browsers that are currently in development. This talk will present a thumbnail sketch of the rapid and seemingly inevitable, but poorly understood, transformation in science communication.