Abstract
Drawing on our research on the ‘badscience’ blog network (Riesch and Mendel 2014), this paper will discuss the construction of this community and how this case study can contribute to our understanding of the geographies of new media and of social research methodologies more broadly. We will look at the spaces that this blogging community interacts with – the physical national location of the network, its interactions with the existing mainstream media spaces in the UK and the virtual above- and below-the-line spaces that allow bloggers and commentators to construct their community (as well as delineating outsiders).
We are grateful to the bloggers who answered our questions, commented on and discussed our work and otherwise helped us. This paper would not have been possible without their assistance. We are also grateful to Stuart Allan for his helpful comments on this chapter and to Lorraine Allibone, Alice Bell, Petra Boynton and Simon Locke for their useful suggestions re this broader project. Thanks are due to participants in discussions of this project at the 2010 Science and the Public conference, to students who discussed these ideas as part of Dundee University’s 2014 Key Ideas in Geography module, and to the editors and reviewers of this volume.
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Notes
- 1.
“Below-the-line” refers to the space in a blog or increasingly online newspaper article, where people can comment and discuss the issue in the main blog post or article (“above-the-line”); these comment spaces are usually situated below the main post or article.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
There is a long history of such blurring – one might note, for example, Allan’s (2006: 13–4) discussion of Time Magazine’s moves towards “electronic dialogue” in the 1990s.
- 8.
A note on our terminology; we use ‘physical’ spaces to refer to spaces in the bloggers’ offline world (for example, which national borders they fall within) and ‘virtual’ spaces to refer to the spaces in the online world (e.g. blogs, blog-networks, online newspapers and their below-the-line spaces on which users can comment), which the bloggers use to write their contributions and interact with other bloggers or commentators. Clearly, these are not discrete categories: instead, we would follow Zook and Graham (2007a) in acknowledging the existence of “complex and hybrid spaces made up of multifarious entangled elements of the virtual and physical environments”. However, this is the best – or the least bad – way we have found to distinguish such spaces.
- 9.
Criado-Perez (2014) has given examples of some of the abuse she faced in a recent blog.
- 10.
Louise Woodward was a British au pair working in Massachusetts, who was controversially convicted in 1997 of the murder (later reduced to involuntary manslaughter) of the baby in her care. The case attracted a lot of media interest in Britain at the time.
- 11.
For example, David Colquhoun has written various Guardian pieces – including http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science and http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2013/jun/02/medical-cure-health-quackery-david-colquhoun
- 12.
For example, Martin Robbins or Frank Swain.
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- 14.
- 15.
In the spirit of self-reflexivity, one should note that this paper itself can be seen as drawing on various below-the-line discussions and is also offering a different space to recirculate this ‘trolling’.
- 16.
- 17.
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Mendel, J., Riesch, H. (2015). Science Blogging Below-the-Line: A Progressive Sense of Place?. In: Mains, S., Cupples, J., Lukinbeal, C. (eds) Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9969-0_15
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