Whilst I’m on the subject of anniversaries, I should note that I’ve just passed another milestone: last Monday marked the third anniversary of Highly Allochthonous. If you ignore the occasional hiatus, I’ve now been blogging for 10% of my life, which, when you think about it, is a tad scary. I’ve been in two minds about how to mark this marginally august occasion, but then I remembered that when I was sharing a few beers with my good friend GrrlScientist in London a few weeks ago, I’d promised her that I’d tell the story of how I got into this whole blogging malarky in the first place. It’s a somewhat rambling and convoluted tale, so if I end up boring you, just remember that it’s all her fault.
My road to online pontificating blogging begins with the fact that along with my obvious interest in science itself, I’ve long been both fascinated and frustrated by the all-too-frequent failures in the communication of science to the general public, with both scientific results, and scientists themselves, ending up rather mangled and misrepresented. Even if, like many scientists, I was probably rather too quick to lay the blame entirely on a soundbite-obsessed media and an incurious public, I did also harbour vague notions of doing something more constructive about this problem. Whilst writing up my PhD thesis in the opening months of 2005, these thoughts – along with an awareness that post-doc opportunities for itinerant palaeomagicians were thin on the ground, and the vague disillusionment verging on abhorrence that many final stage PhD students feel for academia – actually led me to applying for numerous jobs in science publishing. Fairly unsuccessfully, as it turned out, thanks to my “lack of experience”.
At around the same time, however, I ended up attending a “Communicating Science to the Public” course run by the UK research council that funded my PhD. This course proved to be a heartening exception to the rule that anything labelled as “post-graduate training” is better described as “a complete waste of time”, in that it completely changed my thinking about the relationship between scientists, the media, and the public. I began to understand that “we” also bore responsibility for the poor state of science reporting in the media, by largely opting out of doing any of the legwork ourselves, and more often than not sneering at those who did try. What is certainly true is that by washing our hands of any real involvement in the process, we just make it much more likely that ‘dumbed down’ becomes just plain wrong. Amongst other things, then, this course introduced me to the idea that perhaps I could – indeed, I should – make a useful contribution to the public discussion of science as a scientist.
Whilst I was digesting this new insight, I was also exploring the world of science blogging. My route into the blogosphere was through my exploration of the creationist phenomenon. The occasional sceptical question about the age of the Earth or the fossil record is probably one of the occupational hazards of being a geologist, but I had always thought that creationism was a distinctly minority belief even amongst Christians. So it was quite an eye-opener when I started encountering what could at least be described as a certain sympathy towards biblical literalist views in much more moderate circles, and much more frequently than I would have expected. Concerned and fascinated, I turned to the Internet, and discussion forums like Talk Origins, and eventually blogs like The Panda’s Thumb and Pharyngula, which filled me in on the new creationist strategy of trying to hide behind the skirts of its kissing cousin, so-called “Intelligent Design”. But in the process, I found that blogs were not just being used to combat the forces of anti-science; they were also being used to explain new research and talk about how science actually worked.
I was encouraged to see that at least some scientists were taking a more proactive role in science communication, and shared my growing conviction that as scientists we’re duty bound not just to generate knowledge, but to share it with as many people as possible. However, whilst biologists, physicists, and even philosophers of science were successfully getting in on the act, geobloggers were distressingly thin on the ground. It’s no surprise, then, that I’d been thinking for a while, “there should be more geology blogs”; that thought just needed to mutate into “maybe I should write a geology blog”. Right from the beginning, there was a small voice in the back of my head saying, “you could do this…”: I’ve always liked to think I’m reasonably good at writing, and one of the other outcomes of that Communication course getting an article about my research published in my research council’s quarterly magazine (you can follow this link for a pdf), which I received some good feedback for.
It took a few more months to succumb to the temptation, and its not much of a surprise that I made the final plunge in a September, when my navel-gazing tends to reach its annual peak. September 2005 was particularly fertile ground for brooding, too: I submitted my PhD, got interviewed and rejected – very nicely – for a job with Nature, and finally ended up with a quasi-academic job that I wasn’t at all convinced was going to put me on the path to scientific glory. I needed a new challenge. I needed to re-engage myself with a science that, if I’m honest, I’d fallen a little bit out of love with. I needed to feel like I was doing something positive. And so, one evening, I fired up Blogger and started writing.
Thus Highly Allochthonous was born. In many ways, it’s just an experiment that completely ran away from me: although of course I hoped that people, perhaps even lots of people, would read and enjoy my writing, it was one of those hopes that deep down, you never expect to actually be fulfilled. The journey thus far has therefore been as unreal as it has been interesting – and hopefully I’m not done yet.
So, there’s my story; if anyone else cares to relate how they ended up entering the crazy world of geobloggery (or any other type of bloggery for that matter), I for one would be interested.
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