If the power of web 2.0 rests to a great extend on the openness to participate, maybe this is why new media don’t actually make such a good match with science, its hierarchical organization, and gatekeepers at every corner. One could argue that science isn’t as much about mainstream. It matters how often you are cited, but also by whom. It matters that you publish, but also where. Your ideas must be able to connect – but to a certain established canon instead of as many people’s ideas as possible. Bearing that in mind when one looks for the impact of web 2.0 on science, maybe change won’t occur so much in the formal structure of internal scientific communication but rather on the fringes of science. Shouldn’t we then be able to observe a massive online presence of “nerdy ideas”, citizen science and “pseudo” science contents? And how are boundaries between science and non-science re-drawn on the web?
Ps: there must be some footage of people working on the Higgs that resembles the rainbow moment, right?
