Abstract
Experts increasingly use social media to communicate with the wider public, prompted by the need to demonstrate impact and public engagement. While previous research on the use of social media by experts focused on single topics and performed sentiment analysis, we propose to extend the scope by investigating experts’ networks, topics and communicative styles. We perform social and semantic network as well language analysis of top tweeting scientists and economists. We find that economists tweet less, mention fewer people and have fewer Twitter conversations with members of the public than scientists. Scientists use a more informal and involved style and engage wider audiences through multimedia contents, while economists use more jargon, and tend to favour traditional written media. The results point to differences in experts’ communicative practices online, and we propose that disciplinary ways of ‘talking’ may pose obstacles to an effective public communication of expert knowledge.
Highlights
Communication of expert knowledge to a lay audience has been high on the agenda since the end of World War II (Stilgoe et al, 2014)
While sentiment analysis can offer some general insights into the positivity or negativity of a message, it does not reveal any other dimensions of language use and tells us little about the communicative style of expert communication
Assuming that experts with large follow-ships on Twitter can be regarded as engaged expert communicators, we investigate in more detail networks, topics and communicative style of the top 25 most followed scientists and economists
Summary
Communication of expert knowledge to a lay audience has been high on the agenda since the end of World War II (Stilgoe et al, 2014). The understanding held sway that a lay person operates within a cognitive deficit and does not know enough about, for example, science or finance to comprehend what experts do (Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Poon and Olen, 2015). It is the task of the expert to tell the lay people what they need to know and how they ought to think and behave. Some of the communication fiascos of the 1990s including the BSE crisis, GM food and vaccinations have shown the inefficiency and sometimes disastrous consequences of this one-way and top-down model of communication
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