Now, I am usually the person who is
all for the new and exciting crazes, whether it is the latest Jeffrey Campbell
shoe, the up-and-coming underground rap group, or the new hit Broadway show.
One trend that I completely missed though, was twitter. When it came out I
thought it was the worst idea ever. Why would I or anyone else in the world
want to know what everyone was doing constantly? I don’t really care that
@teenageboy had the new McRib from McDonalds or that @highschoolgirl noticed
that the popular girl wore missed matching socks on day. Slowly though, my
hatred for twitter, tweeting, and twit-picing diminished and after a year of an
over-whelming amount of peer-pressure and increasing curiosity I decided to get
a one.
My recent step into the twitter
world has made me realize one thing about our society: information is
accessible. You can log on to
twitter and see what NBC news is covering at any second. You can scroll through
your news feed and see a video of the latest presidential address. You can even
meander through Tumlbr and read different people’s opinion about anything under
the sun. This realization led me to wonder though, if in this day and age,
where information can be found in mere milliseconds, why isn’t science more
wide-spread?
While going through my endless
number of social media accounts, I found my answer: science isn’t available
through popular social media. Most of the time, scientific news, like new
findings, are released to the public in very complicated jargon that only an expert
in the field can understand. Due to this, the news rarely makes it to social
media, therefore rarely reaches millions of potential readers. Even if the news
does reach Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. it is usually misconstrued therefore
spreading false information to the public.
Even though this issue of the
inaccessibility of science is prevalent, the solution is very simple. The first
step is to step away from only using the language of scientists. This jargon is
acceptable when talking to fellow researchers, but when releasing studies to
the public they must be simplified in order to ensure that the majority of the
public understands the findings. The second step is to make science more
exciting. Science currently is presented in a very dry manner, which repels a
good amount of the public. If science were made exciting, then people would not
only be drawn to it but they would also remember it. The third and final step
is to connect the science to an average person’s life. The scientific community
must state why the public should care about an issue, even it’s as far fetch
and weird as quantum physics. If these steps – simplify, excite, and connect –
occur then science will begin to inch into the world of social media, and
before we know it, it will be as wide spread as an Instragram picture of food.
As science spread more, the more scientific literate our society will become as
a whole, which would result in a more progressive, innovative, and all over
beneficial society.
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