Information is a Communicable Disease
Posted Jul 07, 2007
So the actual title of this paper is "Information as a Communicable Disease," but I just prefer poetry to mere metaphor. I slept on this paper for a long time, but once I dug into it, I wound up reading it three times in a row. It's only six pages, but it packs a whallop, and I'll include some of the juciest excerpts here today. As usual, there's a download link at the bottom for the whole paper as a PDF.
"For every person who reads the whole text of a scientific paper, twenty read through the summary, and 500 read the title and stop there. Most papers have their title read and no more." Therefore, a lot must by conveyed by the title. Tremendous energy is spent squeezing the whole message of the study into a brief and appealing headline.
As scientific titles become less of an indication of the paper's content and more of an advertisement, the temptation is towards yellow journalism. In the same vein that supermarket tabloids claim "Study Shows There's Life After Death" and "Lose Weight Without Eating," so scientists are tempted to work into a title catchy hooks like cancer or cloning, or other best-selling buzzwords only indirectly related to the content of the article. The art of title writing is so important that the title is often the most-revised part of any given paper. Workshops devoted to honing this skill are offered at universities.
Surely the reader can already grasp the connection to the "modern" dilemma of keywords and writing blog titles -- issues we've already discussed in the most recent Brainsturbator article, and the SR post about Google's PageRank algorithm. I will continue to mine this connection for insights that will be useful for y'all.
As a side note, you will often find PhysOrg.com will publish the same study multiple times using different headlines -- a mix of demographic testing and the time-honored Shotgun Approach.
The behavior of ideas as they jump from person to person has the same pattern as the spread of the Plague. Both are described by the same mathematical model. Under analysis, the booming exponential growth of scientific ideas actually breaks down into a series of recurring epidemics. Information, it seems, is a communicable disease: scientists are merely willing hosts. This is a handy model, because more is known about the broadcast of disease then about the workings of information nets.
There's a standard curve for the expansion of an epidemic -- slow initial growth, rapid spread, then a tapering off as the population becomes saturated. In the past, scientists relied on intuition for signs of a groundswell in a new field, a hunch of something happening. These days it's important to find the most active areas soon, so the government and private foundations (who generally aren't scientists) monitor the patters of scientific papers carefully with computer-assisted programs and graph the resulting curve on the wall. When the curve begins to match the instep slope preceding a full-fleged epidemic, just at the point they figure a shot of dollars will have maximum effect, they start diverting money in that direction and hope it takes off.
I will be investigating the anatomy of funding for scientific research in future articles -- I'm very curious as to what percentage to the dollars being fed to science is coming from the Pentagon and corporations. (The answer is probably "most of it," but I'm hopeful about being proven wrong.)
DOWNLOAD Information as a Communciable Disease -- Kevin Kelly
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