A picture is worth a thousand words. Pair that picture with some clever text and you’ve got a meme that will be re-tweeted and shared all over the internet until even your grandmother has seen it. Thankfully, there are some great science memes getting made and passed around every day – but there could always be more.
Back in October 2012, Ian Bosdet had the fabulous idea of making journal articles into memes by combining a main idea or quote from the paper with a striking image, with the tag #shareablescience on G+. The idea hasn’t really taken off, even though there are tons of science bloggers out there.
As much as we all love Grumpy Cat, surely more science memes would be better! I propose that each science blogger who writes about a paper (or other scientific topic) also create a meme image to accompany the post (with a shortlink to the post), and include the #shareablescience tag when sharing via social media. The image will show up when the blog post is shared, and hopefully bring traffic back to the blog.
An anecdote from Mary Mangan, referring to the image above: “last Friday I linked to the news article and the paper of this data. It got +9 and 1 share. The new one [with meme image, was posted this Friday at the same time]? +16 and 6 shares.” Of course it’s an anecdote, but it does speak to the power of images to get our attention!
I challenge all Biofortified contributors to add a meme image to their posts! I am not very creative – but that won’t stop me for asking for help from more creative friends when I’m working on a post 😉
Bringing this idea back to Biofortified, you may have noticed there aren’t many meme images about agriculture or biotechnology. The images we see are often inaccurate and designed to fearmonger – like syringes in tomatoes*. Karl started a Biofortified images page with the goal of providing a resource for journalists looking to illustrate a story (we may need to move that to Flickr or come up with a more creative and dynamic way to save images – please share ideas in the comments). Mary started a thread in the Biofortified Forum that encourages collection and creation of memes (again, we need to come up with a better way to store these – back to the GMO Wiki idea?).
One science meme source that provides what I think could be a great strategy example is Refutations to Anti-Vaccine Memes on Facebook (@RtAVM on Twitter). They simply take a claim made by anti-vaccine folks, create a snarky yet science based statement, and pair it with a shocking, striking, or adorable image. Now, this is a good meme!
Thanks to Adrian Kenyon on Flickr for inspiring this post when your images came up when I was searching for Creative Commons images of seeds on Flickr. These lovely and creative yet inaccurate, fearmongering images are exactly why we need to be working on accurate yet funny images that promote science.
*Seriously, these people need to take a plant transformation class!
Biotech Memes
Published
Biofortified 
I made this a while after the CSIRO wheat destruction. Hope its never relevant again.
LikeLike
It was great to see this spurred more interest on G+ too! I still like this idea. I wonder if we could get a grant…propose to study the reach somehow…?
LikeLike
Oooh—I spotted one in the wild: http://thefinchandpea.com/2013/03/02/science-caturday-teh-encat-project/
LikeLike
LikeLike
My collages show the truth about Monsanto as the world’s worst multi-national, it is nothing to do with ‘fear-mongering”. Why do they spend millions of dollars blocking the simple labelling of GM products? Oops, am I fear-mongering again? If they are proud of their products, why not shout it from the roof-tops? It is inaccurate to sell something NOT properly labelled, so don’t tell me who’s being inaccurate! I wouldn’t trust the makers of agent orange with anything…
btw, you need a lesson in manners, as I stumbled across this blog, you never even bothered to contact me before posting this. But then again, I’m not really surprized. At least you found my work “lovely and creative”, so there’s a silver lining to this large, dark cloud.
LikeLike
Hi Adrian, thanks for stopping by. I’m sorry I didn’t contact you to invite you to the conversation. Let’s look at your points one by one:
* Do you have evidence for Monsanto being the “world’s worst multi-national”? What makes them worse than, Walmart or BP for example? Before you reply, please consider that much of the information shared about Monsanto is simply false. A wealth of information about Monsanto has been compiled by the GMO Skepti Forum community, including the Monsanto is not evil starter kit. I don’t care much for Monsanto either way, but I think we should base our opinions on facts.
* Monsanto actually does support labeling of GM products. They do shout from the rooftops about the GM traits in the seeds they sell to farmers. Monsanto can’t label food because they don’t sell any. They oppose a patchwork of laws across the US, but support federal labeling in the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act
*Monsanto was only 1 of 9 companies who were asked by the US government to make Agent Orange, which was used to defoliate jungles in Vietnam. The government specified how to make it and did not ask the companies to do any testing. Agent Orange did end up being associated with unexpected health problems, but we can blame that on the government, not Monsanto or any of the other companies.
LikeLike