Now that I have got my opinions about first kind of performative physicist, let me move on to the second. Namely the ones who post a random apparatus/measuring equipment from a lab and posts a 1000 word caption beneath it. I don't know what the intention of the people who post those are. i.e is their intention to create an outreach post/post that creates awareness to the general public who may see that post? Or is the intention to promote oneself, which may come across as cringe?
If the intention is creating awareness it is ok. But not fine in my opinion. Rather than posting some mundane thing like a pen and saying "this pen is the one with which I write the readings I read off from my equipment", it would be much helpful to just post a picture of the actual equipment and explain its function in 1000 words. That may actually give people the opportunity to see what the physicist is doing in their lab and may or may not understand the science behind it. This is what big collaborations do - post pictures of accelerators, detectors and components of the experiment and explain them properly. Many collaborations have social media pages where they do these and we also follow them, like the posts and share them. It is all fine if the intention behind the post is to spread knowledge, create awareness and inspire a student or two to actually join the experiment and work on it.
It is fine if someone (can be oneself too) is posting the picture of a newly awarded PhD student with a description of their work for the purpose of enlightening people about their work.
It is not fine, when the whole intention is to draw attention to oneself and humble brag with the help of a random thing/prop from somewhere, because one feels the need to promote oneself and tell the world how awesome they are. (I find it unsettling when people, whom others already consider awesome indulge in this sort of behaviour.) Such posts wouldn't have felt cringe had it not been for the essays people write as captions. It is always the captions. (And sometimes the random object one posts which absolutely doesn't make sense scientifically or aesthetically.) Even if the intention of posting something was heartfelt, a lengthy generic and insincere caption can ruin it all and create the impression of self promotion that will come across as cringe. Then there is the question of why one feels the need to promote oneself with such lengthy captions. The captions that are generic and again seem like they are written by some AI. Ultimately everyone will end up "writing" like an AI (oh wait - AI is writing for everyone) and then start uniformly sounding hollow (like an AI). (Just like a certain generation says "gonna, wanna" despite the geo location they grew up in, because of exposure to social media.) There is a thin line between educating others with a post and performing self promotion.
And a question which I want to ask scientists is - "why do we feel the need to behave like celebrities in the entertainment industry"? Really, why do scientists feel the need to attain the status of celebrities in entertainment industry? In that industry, the celebrity is the product - they may have to post numerous photos and videos (if you take any celebrity's page and count the number of posts which doesn't show their face, but a place, thing or something else, it will be very small) as part of their work and to stay relevant. (I know nothing of this industry and I am guessing these as a follower of celebrities on instagram.) Will scientists go out of fashion if we do not create social media posts promoting ourselves doing our profession? Will our relevance dwindle if we stop posting self promotional stuff on the internet? (So from tomorrow onwards to increase my relevance, I shall make a get ready with me video starring my notebooks, the codes I run and then presentations. Or I will post the photo of me writing equations on a notebook and write a ten thousand word essay as a caption on how important it is to add x and y and square it. Or - make a video documenting how dedicated I am to my work even if the recruiters are rejecting my applications even without reading them. May be the cringe videos I can make will make me "relevant" enough to catch everybody's attention. :/)
Are we scientists corporate bros that we feel the need to go to cringedin and do self promotion? Is this to catch the attention of some funding agency that scientists feel the need to post self promotional stuff on social media? Are we scientists trying to catch the attention of algorithms which will then present these in front of some potential funding agency who may just give pennies for research? Is this the intention? (If so, shouldn't the funding agencies be doing their duty and allocate enough money for research rather than to make very intelligent people act like total crazies on the internet?) Or is this phenomenon simply driven by narcissism and over exposure to social media? (And it is especially cringe if people above a certain age do it - people who started using a certain social media app very late compared to younger people.)
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Ofcourse I am guilty of self promotion too. I also post photos and videos where I appear as part of something like a lab work. Sometimes I do post captions out of excitement, the excitement of being able to work on whatever I was working on, in that video or photo. But it will become heartless and hollow if I treat that photo and video as a means of self promotion accompanied with ten thousand words describing how proud and humbled (see cringedin has made it impossible for me not to dislike these two words appearing in succession) I am to go and work on my experiment even if I am truly reminded that I am a nobody, by the scale of the experiments I work on? It will be so bad if I start treating it as a means of showing off my "prowess" (or as an ego boost) rather than concentrating on what I actually learn from doing the work in the said photo or video. If I were to post things like :
"Proud and humbled to do such and such special task in my detector, which won the so and so prize in my field in the year N." And then go on describing the detector and the task in hollow words that they sound so fake that the reader starts hating me instead of getting an idea of the science I do. Readers can tell that the motivation is neither to explain the detector nor the science, but just to show off indirectly that I am so awesome by association with a so and so prize winning scientific project. It will feel very bad to me and others.
Some things are better left unsaid or said in a few words. Sharing genuine happiness via a post or video is fine. Posting educational content to create awareness/for science outreach is fine. But when a post veers into the territory of soulless self promotion, the readers will definitely find it annoying. It also matters where someone is posting these. Cringedin is the root of all this evil, facebook is the dump yard, instagram is the place where these posts can really irritate users (aka physicists who want to keep their personal and professional social media apart to some extend) and whatsapp is...well connected to fb. I guess if someone wants to dump stuff, they can do so from fb.
I wonder what the psychology of a scientist, who wakes up with a plan to create a self promotional post that contains a mundane photo/video, is. Like, which scientist has the time and energy to shoot a video, a photo and write a novel in their caption all while doing actual work? Somebody please enlighten me. (Here I am struggling to even function properly because I am always tethered to a screen due to the work for which I am not even paid, and there are people who are just posting random stuff on the internet in the name of science! Shouldn't you be working on your actual job - which is doing science, being a scientist, asking questions, solving problems and being duly diligent?)
Anyway, these are my personal opinions. Are people going to stop posting cringe self promotional posts on platforms? No. Are people going to hate me for saying these? Probably yes. Will my own criticism deter me from posting such photos and videos of mine? No! So I guess we all have our own ego to boost and narcissism to nurture.
