An oral history of Ocean Science Twitter

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 Friend Science had been cooking for over a year at that point, and we were excited about the near-limitless potential of the social web.

Blogs were still king, with Deep Sea News, and Oyster’s Garter, and Malaria, Bedbugs, Sealice, and Sunsets and myriad others speaking up for the oceans, online. But this isn’t a history of ocean science bloggers, this is a history of Ocean Science Twitter.

Those early days were, more than anything, fun. We were still finding our voices and finding our communities. David joined soon after and the rest of the core Ocean’s Online crew arrived soon after. We were live-tweeting experiments, sharing hypotheses, planning research projects, starting collaborations, forming communities.

Twitter is gone now, replaced by the impersonal X, not just a new brand name, but a reminder that you should close that tab. Since its acquisition by Elon Musk, the once-vibrant site has been slowly gutted, transformed into a desperate grab for cash from subscribers and an endless sea of paid content. But if this last year has been a tale of slow decline, this last few weeks have been the final death roll. The rebrand to X was bad, but far, far worse was the protection, promotion, and financial compensation of a user who posted explicit child sexual abuse material. There’s nothing left of the Twitter that was.

Everything changed for Ocean Science Twitter on April 20, 2010, when the Macondo oil well rupture, setting the Deepwater Horizon aflame. Eleven oil rig workers died and 200 million gallon of crude oil poured into the Gulf of Mexico. The community mobilized quickly to provide critical context and public outreach as the disaster stretched from days to months. Ocean scientists on Twitter were positioned to respond to media queries and act as expert sources, but beyond the communications push, scientific collaborations emerged from these very large, very public discussions. As one example, we determined that I had some of the most recent pre-spill sediment samples from the areas near the disasters and identified the right researchers to work up those samples and provide a necessary baseline for understand the scope and scale of the spill.

Read More

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

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

The Original. Accept no imitations.

The dark side of “Stop the Scroll”

I have had the pleasure of working communications roles in several industries over the years.  During this time, I’ve seen the rise of a dubious campaign metric commonly referred to as “Stop the Scroll” (or “Swipe”).  This metric has conscientious roots.  Online communications strategists have less than a second to grab a potential donor, stakeholder, or client’s attention.  Good strategists have read Craig McClain’s paper, as a great visual will make your thumb quiver before scrolling on to a video of dogs doing literally anything.  In this light, stop the scroll seems like a pretty good metric for individual post efficacy.  Time is the currency of experience, after all.

Can we count the seconds people spend learning untrue facts as progress towards our campaign? Or change the campaign goals to justify a resource-heavy shit post? 

Read More

Remembering Walter Munk, a photo on a flash drive in a pile of poo from a seal at the bottom of the sea, lucky vikings, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: February 11, 2019

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Carsten Egevang goes looking for seals in Greenland and finds a photogenic guillemot instead.
This photo of a sealion on a Southland beach was found on a USB stick swallowed by a leopard seal. Credit: unknown
Read More

To tweet to whom – a tweeting guide for marine scientists

Logic is a tweeting bird” – Spock, Star Trek

Social media can be a great tool for spreading and disseminating published science. Potentially it can reach a wide audience and for free !

Most platforms allow you to insert links to direct readers to the original paper or publication. If you are working in an area that is relevant to conservation or policy, social media can be a great way of getting papers to the right audience that may need that information (Parsons et al., 2014). Moreover, there is now increasing data that using social media can increase download and citation rates of scientific papers, which in turn is good for the careers of scientists in an academic setting.

Read More

How goats got the bends, a new ship for VIMS, a new deep-sea submersible for all of us, our looming destruction, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: October 15, 2018.

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Bends in the foreleg of a goat after experiments performed by physiologist John S. Haldane, published in the Journal of Hygiene Vol. 8, 1908.

Bends in the foreleg of a goat after experiments performed by physiologist John S. Haldane, published in the Journal of Hygiene Vol. 8, 1908.

Submersible. Photo courtesy Discovery.

Photo courtesy Discovery.

Read More

Lions, Whales, and the Web: Transforming Moment Inertia into Conservation Action

I have a new paper out today with an incredible team of co-authors: Naomi Rose, Mel Cosentino, and Andrew Wright.

Thaler and friends (2017) Lions, Whales, and the Web: Transforming Moment Inertia into Conservation Action. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2017.00292.

In it, we look at three case-studies of online and offline reactions to the deaths of specific, charismatic animals, and discuss how preparation, planning, and tactical thinking can be used to promote effective conservation messaging in the wake of these haphazard events. We talk about how outrage, empathy, and curiosity play a role in the global conversation and how to effectively mobilize this attention into conservation action.

Conservation activism following moment inertia is a balancing act between strategic planning and a quick, tactical response. When the catalyst is moral outrage, it is important to allow people to be angry, rather than to try and curb such responses. In these circumstances, it is possible to leverage predictable moral signaling into tangible conservation gains.

Regardless of the emotional reaction—outrage, curiosity, or empathy—the general guidelines for conservationists leveraging moment inertia are the same. First, planning for pseudorandom events is essential to produce meaningful outcomes. Second, understanding the limitations of campaigning on an inertial moment will help establish and achieve concrete, realistic goals. Third, the call to action must be informed by the local context, address local cultural values, and be delivered by those who can connect with the public. Finally, it is critical to maintain a factual basis while acknowledging the emotions involved.

With foresight, a focus on concrete goals, and an understanding of the strengths and limitations inherent in moment inertia, these events can be harnessed to help achieve lasting conservation successes.

Thaler and friends (2017)

What is Moment Inertia: Moment Inertia is a phenomenon that arises from focus of attention around a single, clarifying event, or moment, which propagates, undirected, through media unless acted upon by outside forces.

Read More

Hone your social media #SciComm skills with ocean science pros.

Looking to boost your ocean outreach skills in a more formal setting? We’ve got two opportunities for social media training with ocean science and ocean communications experts from Southern Fried Science:

LUMCON Summer Course: Join me at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium on the Gulf Coast for a week-long workshop on Science Communication Using Social Media led by yours truly. We’ll cover the foundations of social media platforms and best practices for communicating your research to both general and targeted audiences. We’ll also discuss metrics and measuring how effective your outreach really is.

Duke Environmental Leadership Program: For the fifth year, Dr. Amy Freitag and I will run Social Media for Environmental Communications, a 7-week, online-only course that digs deep into the fundamentals of using social media for environmental communications, provides a critical assessment of the available tools, and teaches student to design effective communications campaigns and assess their impact.

 

Combating fake science in popular media – six months later

As noted earlier, David and my paper on twitter, social media, Shark Week, and fake documentaries came out last week. Since scientific publishing has a “long tail” — the time between when we actually wrote the paper and when it was published, in this case, was almost 9 months — we thought it might be a useful exercise to discuss our paper in the context of the months leading up to and following the most recent Shark Week. Enjoy!

You can find the original paper here: Fish tales: Combating fake science in popular media.