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Showing posts from November, 2015

Science, China and why we should all take notice of WeChat.

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I spent last week in Shanghai exploring the use of social media to communicate science as part of my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship . I had an extremely busy week and was lucky enough to meet with researchers in science communication, representatives from Nature and the Royal Society of Chemistry in Shanghai. Who all gave me extremely valuable insights into science communication and social media in China. Welcome to Shanghai! The majority of my time was spent at Shanghai Jiao Tong University , which is a well established institution in China. I visited researcher Dr Yi Mou who has written a number of papers about the use of social media for health messaging and its uptake by academics on a professional basis in China. Yi Mou also translated some interesting findings from science communication surveys in China that have been conducted over the past number of years. Me, Dr Li Mou and Dr Nainan Wen from Nanjing University where I also visited I was i...

Social media networks are becoming more like real life, not less

This week there's been a higher than normal amount of discussion around to the topic of 'the death of social media', well, there has been on my social media networks. And that links to what I want to talk about in this post. The Atlantic published a piece yesterday on 'The Decay of Twitter' which followed the announcement that Twitter was running at a financial loss. Today, Essena O'Neill announced that she is quitting Instagram because social media 'isn't real life'.  I've found the discussions around both of these really interesting but many discussions about social media often assume a couple of points that I think should be thought about further and these haven't really been addressed in commentary that I have seen. 1) Everyone should be using the same social network Obviously for a social network to be a social network it needs users and for business (like Twitter) additional users is a sign that they are doing well. But as a use...