Social Media and Science - The Series

This series is meant to be a demonstrative exercise in how to ask good questions of science and knowledge production presented to us. While I’ll primarily focus on examples in social media, I’ll model tactics and approaches one can use in more formal scientific and research spaces. This series focuses on social media because of its penchant for fast consumption which indirectly implies a lack of sustained and deep engagement with sophisticated concepts. Recognizing how important social media is, we cannot dismiss the impacts it has on shaping reality, thought, law, policy, and decision making. Applying my background in qualitative social science research, what this series will engage with are the ways in which we are shaped by presentations that appear to be ‘science’ or reflect scientific work, language and processes. This will hopefully help one understand the ways in which we are regularly inundated with formats that shape how we think about the world and the people in it. Given my own academic expertise, much of the examples in the series will be connected to issues of race, class, gender, sex, sport, nationality, and supposed cultural difference. At Arima Consulting, LLC one of our goals is to support our collaborators with more precise tools to reach their goals. Most professionals rarely have the time to assess their own toolkit and therefore rely on the toolkits of others that also go unvetted because they come to us in a format that looks like “good science”. This series will help others understand the difference between “commonsense” understandings of complex topics versus critical engagement - trying to determine “how we come to know things”. In even the most sophisticated and high-level scientific spaces I have regularly witnessed the casual adoption and application of crucial categories that need serious consideration before being utilized to make assertions about the human condition. If science and the knowledge it brings us is important, then it is incumbent upon us to engage more deeply in the seemingly “casual” virtual spaces of social media with its far-reaching impact on those who spend most of their time in these spaces.