Researchfluencers
What am I describing?
Step 1. Select a catchy title, maybe something that’s controversial.
Step 2. Write a captivating first few lines, enough so to hook the reader to continue.
Step 3. Add a carefully crafted image, with eye-watering color blends and amplified contrast that’s sure to capture attention.
Step 4. Once the audience is hooked, tell a relatable backstory, exude confidence, and show that you know your stuff.
Step 5. Now, sell your brilliant ideas, designs, and dreams.
Step 6. Finally, conclude with an exciting vision of the future, and maybe plug some of your other brilliant insights.
Did I just describe writing an Instagram post, a Twitter thread, or an academic paper?
Exactly.
Before there were follower counts and number of re-tweets, academics had citations and h-indices.
Before there was “going live” and paid “audio-only spaces”, academics had invited talks and summer schools.
I posit that academics and researchers are perhaps the first influencers. If I may, “researchfluencers”.
Just as researchfluencers compete for funding to deliver novel insights and push the boundaries of understanding, ever-connected YouTube/Twitter/ Snapchat/Instagram/ClubHouse/TikTok/LinkedIn/Facebook/Substack/ Medium/Reddit (WSB anyone?) influencers compete for your attention by A/B testing the “Algorithm” [1] to push their content to a broader audience.
The difference lies not in the action or motive, but in the audience and medium.
Whereas the former writes about the design of a complex system through a peer-reviewed publication, the latter tweets about a deep philosophical realization via 280 characters, or posts an Instagram “Reel” of their creamed coffee as they were philosophizing (yes, it’s a word).
Just as we value the impact of highly influential academic papers [2,3], one cannot deny the impact of a well-placed meme on social change [4,5].
At the end of the day, we are all social creatures who find validation and opportunity through sharing and exchanging. New mediums simply allow more of us to easily express ourselves to broader audiences and with fewer barriers of entry (e.g., higher education, gate-kept opportunity, etc.).
This is not to say that traditional researchfluencers don’t use modern-day influencing tools to interact with and broaden their audience. Over the past year and accelerated by the pandemic, many instructors have partially or fully migrated their teaching material to platforms such as YouTube, academic venues such as large machine learning conferences use SlidesLive to host recordings of papers and keynote presentations, and Twitter has become a go-to source of not only staying up to date with the latest work but also disseminating ones own [7,8,9].
As a final thought, I leave you with this tweet [6] which has sturred a lot of reflection in me. The gist of it is that Mark Rober, an ex-NASA engineer who literally helped put the Curiosity Rover on Mars, has since started a YouTube channel with the slogan of “new ideas, science, and engineering”. He puts out YouTube videos each month for his follower base of 18 M+ people, which garner millions (if not 10's of millions) of views within the first week of release. The same Mark Rober co-authored a peer-reviewed publication proposing tubing configuration and design for the Mars Science Laboratory Descent Stage, which had a whopping 323 views since 2009. Both statistics are out-of-this-world ;)
[1] https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-algorithms/
[2] https://www.altmetric.com/top100/2020/
[4] https://time.com/5922998/the-most-impactful-memes-of-2020/
[5] https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/183936/Huntington_colostate_0053A_14303.pdf
[6] https://twitter.com/joshmnicholson/status/1266523445938065409?s=20
[7] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229446