Question: Do You Think Your work Will Intrest The Public?

Daniel Mietchen answered on 16 Jun 2010:

(1) The public is a diverse group whose interests seem to change rapidly, partly in response to the mass media and to others in their social network.

(2) The public tends to slice research in rather large pieces – think of “I like biology” or “I am interested in cancer”. But even at the level of “my auntie has breast cancer, so I want to find out about it”, this interest covers the work of many thousands of scientists, very few of which will ever be reached personally by the interest of the public.

Combining (1) and (2), I tend to think that my research will not get the public interested, even though individual members thereof might (and do) indeed find it interesting as far as I can manage to explain it.

However, online platforms like blogs, wikis or even “I’m a Scientist” allow for more (and more direct) interaction between scientists and the public, and this may bring in occasional sways of interest for scientific work that would probably never receive much attention from the public otherwise. This has happened to my research too: For instance, this image from a blog post of mine has found its way into Seed Magazine.