The performative physicist - Part 1

 I started writing about AI slop but quit writing midway, but this a is topic which I feel is related and I strongly feel about this so I may actually finish writing it. 

The reason why I wanted to write this is because of the increasing amount of self promotional slop that some physicists have been doing on social media. May be this is not restricted to physicists, people from other fields may also be doing the same, but I as a physicist encounter physics related stuff more. And it is very very annoying to be honest. Hate me for saying it, but it really is. 

There are different kinds of self promotion that I find truly cringe worthy. The first, the posting of screenshots of a recently published paper with an essay like caption on social media platforms. Second, the people who post the most mundane things like a measuring apparatus from a lab and then post a 1000 word essay about the work they do in the lab. Third, the people who post constantly on social media about the group they have created in their institute and act like nobody else in the world has ever created a group and again write essays as captions about the work the group does. Then there are also people who post photos of other people visiting their labs/institutes and giving talks and making a big deal out of it on social media (again with an essay like caption). The other, in my very personal opinion is the fiasco people create in the name of promoting gender equality in STEM, but this has ultimately become another option for essay posters to write infinite essays about gender equality which is not at all achieved by the performances on social media.  

I am not saying that I am not a flawless critic of these activities. I myself am guilty of the things which I wrote about, myself and have dabbled in posting myself in the past. As a matter of fact, I still do post and brag. But where I draw the line is the captions and the level of insincere self promotion in the form of the slop that is the caption. I have been thinking about it for sometime (also correlated to the AI slop post I wanted to write). i.e, why I find the self promotion posts accompanied by the slop captions annoying. So here are some thoughts on the performances physicists give on social media.  

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First of all I find it annoying probably because I still have partitions of which content should go where, in my mind. Remember that old trend where everyone was posting about "your facebook dp, your instagram dp, your linkedin dp and your tinder dp"? That trend implied that there should be a separation between what you post on different platforms and there is a difference between your business related account vs your personal account. I still have that (outdated?) idea in my mind when it comes to content. Probably that is why I find people posting screenshots of their newest publication with an essay like caption on whatsapp and instagram annoying because in my ancient mind they both are for personal use. Especially instagram (as if I don't post paper links and shift videos on instagram)!  

Now to anyone who may think that this person is so outdated that she is ignorant of whatsapp and instagram being used for business, please wait a little bit until I write a few more things.  

Let me talk about the "screenshot of paper accompanied by an essay caption phenomenon". Yes publishing a paper is a big deal. It comes after months, sometimes years of hard work, heartbreaking referee comments and lots of corrections and additional work demanded by the referees. It is the culmination of a very tiring process and every scientist/author/academic has the right to savour the success and brag about it to the whole wide world and share the happiness. And to nudge the peers in the field to read it by posting the link of the paper on all possible social media apps. 

But when does it cross the line into becoming self promotion and cringe worthy? It is when people screenshot the abstract, and post that screenshot with a caption much longer than the abstract and make it look like they are the first ones to publish a paper in the whole wide (academic) world. Then the whole post becomes a means of self promotion and less about telling the people who might actually be interested to read about your work. The whole point of an abstract is to make the reader get an idea of what is in the paper. If you are posting a screenshot of the abstract, what is the need to explain it further? Can't the scientific audience go and read the paper on their own? Are the audience that dumb, that the creator of the post has to rewrite the entire paper in a caption? 

  Or are you putting up a performance to the lay people in your contact list? The lay people who may not even be interested in knowing what you worked on? I mean who is the target audience of such posts?    

 Ahhh the caption! What can one say about it? So insincere, so sloppy, so generic that the reader feels like it is generated by one AI or the other. :/ First of all if you really want to share your happiness and brag about something, do it in your own words. Not with some generic essay an AI churns out. When you rely on an AI tool to "express your heartfelt feelings", it ultimately leads to a post which has no heart, no soul and reeks of insincerity. 

  Your fellow scientists are smart enough to click on the paper link or the arXiv link if the paper is not open access and read it for themselves. And especially for people in high energy physics, the links to your papers and your author profiles are available on Inspire. Anybody who wants to find out about your "productivity", h-index and how awesome you are, can actually go there and find it. Dear fellow (hep) physicists, your fellow (hep) physicists are smart enough to click on a link, download, read and digest the contents of your paper if they are really interested. You don't have to post the AI generated sloppy caption for your paper on a social media platform. If you really have to describe the core idea of the paper to a scientific audience, you can, but please don't make it this self promotional cringe content that will turn people away from your work in addition to undermining human curiosity that may make the audience go and read the paper. If you really want people to read your paper, don't post that long essay caption and let go off this self promotion cringe.

And please don't use that AI generated slop as your caption! You are a scientist, not a business bro or someone from the entertainment industry who has to put up a performance everywhere to keep their relevance. 

To be continued... 

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PS : Having said all these, I will still like a post where someone has posted about their new paper, because people do need digital applause too for a publication from their peers. 

PPS : I will blame "cringedin" for all these, because that is where the humble bragging accompanied by insincere words probably began and then millenial social media users just took it to all other platforms accessible. :/ 

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