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Over 15 years of ocean science and conservation online

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Category: Blogging

Bluesky is now open. Science Twitter, here’s how to use it!

Posted on February 6, 2024February 6, 2024 By David Shiffman
Bluesky is now open. Science Twitter, here’s how to use it!
Blogging, Featured

The once-great science twitter is, depending on who you talk to, either dying or dead. Once a vibrant place for many discussions related to my fields of marine biology, ocean conservation, and public science communication, it’s been described now as an abandoned shopping mall that’s been taken over by neo-Nazi gangs. Lots of people have … Read More “Bluesky is now open. Science Twitter, here’s how to use it!” »

“If that’s so important to shark conservation, why have I never heard of it?”

Posted on February 2, 2024 By David Shiffman
“If that’s so important to shark conservation, why have I never heard of it?”
Blogging, Science

In which I attempt to answer an interesting question I received during a public talk. Much of the focus of my career in shark research, policy, and communications has been influenced by my time doing public science engagement on social media. I’ve attended dozens of scientific conferences and conservation policy meetings, I’ve spent thousands of … Read More ““If that’s so important to shark conservation, why have I never heard of it?”” »

What you read on Southern Fried Science in January

Posted on January 31, 2024 By Andrew Thaler
What you read on Southern Fried Science in January
Blogging

By pretty much every metric, this month was the best month we’ve had at Southern Fried Science since the pandemic began. It turns out people do still read blogs and just a little bit of effort posting regular updates goes a long way. 13,500 of you stopped by to see what we were writing and … Read More “What you read on Southern Fried Science in January” »

15 things I’m proudest of in 15 years of science blogging

Posted on January 26, 2024 By David Shiffman
15 things I’m proudest of in 15 years of science blogging
Blogging

Today marks 15 years of blogging for Southern Fried Science! In that time, I’ve written over 600 blog posts on a huge variety of topics, and spread the good word about shark science and conservation. I’d like to celebrate the occassion by looking back on 15 things that I’m proudest of during my time as … Read More “15 things I’m proudest of in 15 years of science blogging” »

An oral history of Ocean Science Twitter

Posted on August 10, 2023May 3, 2024 By Andrew Thaler
An oral history of Ocean Science Twitter
Blogging, Featured

I created my Twitter account in the spring of 2009. Back then, science blogging was new and we all though that using pseudonyms for anonymity was the pragmatic and cool thing to do. Southern Fried Science had been cooking for over a year at that point, and we were excited about the near-limitless potential of … Read More “An oral history of Ocean Science Twitter” »

I am deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler and this is where you verify my social media accounts.

Posted on November 7, 2022November 21, 2022 By Andrew Thaler
Blogging

These are my active social media accounts: Twitter (automated posting): https://twitter.com/DrAndrewThaler Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drandrewthaler Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drandrewthaler/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@drandrewthaler Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@DrAndrewThaler Project Mushroom: https://projectmushroom.social/@DrAndrewThaler

So Elon Musk bought Twitter…

Posted on October 28, 2022October 28, 2022 By Andrew Thaler
So Elon Musk bought Twitter…
Blogging

For a while it seemed like the deal wasn’t going to go through. After his initial offer, Elon Musk tried everything he could to back out of it, short of sitting for a deposition in the resulting law suit. But, at the end of the day, it went through, and Elon Musk now owns Twitter.

Lots of folks are worried about what a Musk-controlled Twitter will become. His conditional commitment to press freedom depends entirely on how much praise is heaped upon him. His record as an employer is a mess. And now he controls one of the most potent, though slowly waning, outlets for public engagement, and certainly the preferred medium of journalists and politicians.

I’ve taught Social Media for Environmental Communications at Duke University for the last 11 years. Every year there’s been some big social media shakeup, and every year we look at how that shakeup will impact professionals using social media primary as an outreach and engagement tool. This has the potential to big the biggest shift in how folks approach social media that we’ve seen in a long time. But it also could be a whole heap of nothing. It all depends on the whims of a single, inconsistent owner who may not really know what he has or what his vision for it is.

So what will this new Twitter look like? I suspect that we won’t see tectonic shifts in how Twitter operates immediately. It will take months for any of Musk’s vision to trickle into the user experience. I don’t get the impression that there are many people left for whom an ownership change is going to push them to finally get a Twitter account. The platform seems largely out of its growth phase. So there will likely be a slow and steady attrition of users as they get less and less out of using Twitter. They won’t be replaced.

Long-term, I expect to see a hard push towards monetization of an increasingly small active user base. Which, in itself, will make that user base even smaller.

Read More “So Elon Musk bought Twitter…” »

Inauguration-induced landsickness: what you feel when the shaky world beneath your feet suddenly stabilizes, and how to feel better

Posted on January 22, 2021January 22, 2021 By David Shiffman 1 Comment on Inauguration-induced landsickness: what you feel when the shaky world beneath your feet suddenly stabilizes, and how to feel better
Blogging

For the past few days I, like many of you, have felt a variety of intense emotions. First and foremost I’ve felt an overwhelming sense of relief. No matter what happens next, Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States, and he and his enablers can no longer work to destroy so much of what we love and value (at least not as easily). We can start the hard work of fixing so many things that have been awful and growing worse every day. I’ve felt hope that we can start to make things better, and I’ve even felt a little bit of joy at the noteworthy progress that’s already been made. All of this was expected, but one thing I haven’t expected is how much of a particular sensation I’m feeling, and have seen other people report feeling as well. For some of my friends it was a totally unfamiliar sensation, but as a marine scientist I recognized it immediately: many of us are basically experiencing landsickness, also called “dock rock” or “mal de debarquement syndrome”.

Read More “Inauguration-induced landsickness: what you feel when the shaky world beneath your feet suddenly stabilizes, and how to feel better” »

A decade of failures in Science Communication.

Posted on February 12, 2020February 18, 2020 By Andrew Thaler 4 Comments on A decade of failures in Science Communication.
Blogging

Eleven years is a long life for a science blog. Southern Fried Science was born in 2008, when the main writers were all graduate students. Over the last decade the online landscape has changed. Science Communication changed with it, adapting and evolving to meet an ever-shifting ecosystem. Looking back on the last decade and thinking about the next, it’s becoming easier to see where we went wrong. It’s not quite as easy to determine what we need to correct the course.

This is not a scientific assessment, this is my own personal observations from the last decade of running Southern Fried Science, from teaching Social Media for Environmental Communications for the last 7 years, from working with Upwell, one of the most dynamic and visionary ocean NGOs ever conceived, from helping build and launch multiple online platforms, dozens of novel programs, and hundreds of outreach campaigns, and from spending a lot of time since November 2016 reflecting on what we’ve done wrong.

That Hideous Deficit

Do we really need another 200 words on how bad the deficit model is and why it needs to die?

Apparently, yes.

The basic premise: that science perception and policy is shaped by an information deficit and that if we just make good science education content and spread it, we can combat the spread of misinformation, people will learn, and everything will get better.

It doesn’t work. It never worked. And it ignores the reality that misinformation is manufactured for political and financial gain, with tremendous incentives and, often, far better funding than science outreach campaigns. But beyond that, multiple studies have shown that, when confronted with information that challenges their fundamental world view, people don’t throw out their worldview, they reject the science, creating a more entrenched and intractable audience.

Read More “A decade of failures in Science Communication.” »

What the hell is the DC Metro’s “climate change will increase shark bites” ad talking about? An investigation

Posted on January 14, 2020January 14, 2020 By David Shiffman
Blogging, Climate change

Ever since I moved to Washington, DC last summer, I’ve been fascinated by an ad campaign for the DC Metro. The premise of the campaign is simple: taking public transit reduces your carbon footprint compared with driving yourself. It highlights various negative consequences of climate change, and points out how riding the Metro can help fight them.

Many of these ads highlight well-known consequences of climate change:

Photos by David Shiffman

Others highlight less well-known consequences of climate change, but are still on solid scientific ground:

Photo via DC Metro twitter account

But one ad in particular has been perplexing me for months:

Read More “What the hell is the DC Metro’s “climate change will increase shark bites” ad talking about? An investigation” »

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