2M Khurana1ySpeed of information transfer: There’s good reason to believe that social media
rapidly increases the speed at which science can be disseminated. Ideally, this
increases the rate of medical discovery by a) making us aware of what others are
doing and that we can build on and b) exposing us to alternative approaches and
methods from other disciplines that we can integrate into our own work. I’ve
certainly benefitted greatly from being exposed to ‘random’ articles from other
fields.
Epistemic disorientation: In contrast to the first point, there are potentially
negative effects of social media on both the rate and direction of discovery.
For example, one the main issues with social media is that we can end up
inducing a type of epistemic disorientation, where there is simply too much
information to make sense of anything. We experienced some of this during
COVID-19, where the amount of (contrasting) information that was being published
ultimately confused us more than it provided clarity. Downstream consequences of
this are that we end up having to conduct research to disprove the opinions of
others, rather than doing it for any scientific reasons. Various conspiracy
theories circulating online, such as the link between vaccination and autism,
could also waste research resources.
Hype: Social media could also overhype certain treatments (e.g., Wegovy at the
moment). This could result in disproportionate amounts of funding going towards
‘trendy’ research areas, meaning that resources are detracted from potentially
more pressing health areas. In the book I call this ‘scientific bubbles’, where
too much capital is concentrated in a small research area; the fear is, of
course, that our expectations fail to materialize – resulting in a bubble burst
of confidence and a loss of public trust in science.
Definitely many other ways - but these three come to mind most immediately!
What is the impact of social media on medical discovery?