Skip to main content

Advertisement

SpringerLink
Log in

“A Light Switch in the #Brain”: Optogenetics on Social Media

  • Brief Communication
  • Published:
Neuroethics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Neuroscience communication is increasingly taking place on multidirectional social media platforms, creating new opportunities but also calling for critical ethical considerations. Twitter, one of the most popular social media applications in the world, is a leading platform for the dissemination of all information types, including emerging areas of neuroscience such as optogenetics, a technique aimed at the control of specific neurons. Since its discovery in 2005, optogenetics has been featured in the public eye and discussed extensively on social media, but little is known about how this new technique is portrayed and who the users participating in the conversation are. To address this gap, we conducted content analysis of a sample of 1000 tweets mentioning “optogenetics” over a one-year period between 2014 and 2015. We found that academic researchers are the largest group contributing to the conversation, that the tweets often contain links to third-party websites from news organizations and peer-reviewed journals, and that common thematic motifs include the applications of optogenetics specifically for the control of brain activity and the treatment of disease. We also found that the majority of the tweets are neutral in their tone regarding optogenetics. As Twitter serves as a current and dynamic forum for exchange about advances in neuroscience, the conversation about optogenetics on this engaging platform can inform socially-responsive knowledge dissemination efforts in this area.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

References

  1. Robillard, Julie, Louise Whiteley, Thomas Johnson, Jonathan Lim, Wyeth Wasserman, and Judy Illes. 2013. Utilizing social media to study information-seeking and ethical issues in gene therapy. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi:10.2196/jmir.2313.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Robillard, Julie, Emanuel Cabral, Craig Hennessey, Brian Kwon, and Judy Illes. 2015. Fueling hope: stem cells in social media. Stem Cell Reviews. doi:10.1007/s12015–015-9591-y.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Hawn, Carleen. 2009. Take two aspirin and tweet me in the morning: how Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are reshaping health care. Health Affairs. doi:10.1377/hlthaff.28.2.361.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Twitter Inc. 2016. Twitter. https://about.twitter.com/company. Accessed 8 May 2016

  5. Acar, Adam, and Yuya Muraki. 2011. Twitter for crisis communication: lessons learned from Japan’s tsunami disaster. International Journal of Web Based Communities. doi:10.1504/IJWBC.2011.041206.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Conover, Michael, Jacob Ratkiewicz, Matthew R. Francisco, Bruno Gonçalves, Filippo Menczer, and Alessandro Flammini. 2011. Political polarization on Twitter. ICWSM 133: 89–96.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Chew, Cynthia, and Gunther Eysenbach. 2010. Pandemics in the age of Twitter: content analysis of tweets during the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. PloS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0014118.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Rybalko, Svetlana, and Trent Seltzer. 2010. Dialogic communication in 140 characters or less: how Fortune 500 companies engage stakeholders using Twitter. Public Relations Review. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.08.004.

    Google Scholar 

  9. Bruns, Axel, and Stefan Stieglitz. 2012. Quantitative approaches to comparing communication patterns on Twitter. Journal of Technology in Human Services. doi:10.1080/15228835.2012.744249.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Grunig, James, and Todd Hunt. 1984. Managing public relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Sha, Bey-Ling. 2007. Dimensions of public relations: moving beyond traditional public relations models. In New Media and Public Relations, ed. S.C. Duhe, 3–26. New York: Peter Lang.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Waters, Richard, and Jia Jamal. 2011. Tweet, tweet, tweet: a content analysis of nonprofit organizations’ Twitter updates. Public Relations Review. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2011.03.002.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Adams, Samantha. 2010. Revisiting the online health information reliability debate in the wake of “web 2.0”: an inter-disciplinary literature and website review. International Journal of Medical Informatics. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2010.01.006.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Boyden, Edward, Feng Zhang, Ernst Bamberg, Georg Nagel, and Karl Deisseroth. 2005. Millisecond-timescale, genetically targeted optical control of neural activity. Nature Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nn1525.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Deisseroth, Karl. 2011. Optogenetics. Nature Methods. doi:10.1038/nmeth.f.324.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Deisseroth, Karl. 2012. Optogenetics and psychiatry: applications, challenges, and opportunities. Biological Psychiatry. doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.021.

    Google Scholar 

  17. Malpass, Katy. 2012. Epilepsy: shining a light on seizure control - optogenetic approach shows promise for treatment and prevention of epilepsies. Nature Reviews Neurology. doi:10.1038/nrneurol.2012.256.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Pascoli, Vincent, Marc Turiault, and Christian Lüscher. 2012. Reversal of cocaine-evoked synaptic potentiation resets drug-induced adaptive behavior. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature10709.

    Google Scholar 

  19. Racine, Eric, Ofek Bar-Ilan, and Judy Illes. 2005. fMRI in the public eye. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nrn1609.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Illes, Judy, Mary Moser, Jennifer McCormick, Eric Racine, Sandra Blakeslee, Arthur Caplan, Erika Hayden, Jay Ingram, Tiffany Lohwater, Peter McKnight, Christie Nicholson, Anthony Phillips, Kevin Sauvé, Elaine Snell, and Samuel Weiss. 2010. Neurotalk: improving the communication of neuroscience research. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nrn2773.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Deisseroth, Karl. 2010. Controlling the brain with light. Scientific American 5(3): 48–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Gilbert, Frederic, Alexander Harris, and Robert Kapsa. 2014. Controlling brain cells with light: ethical considerations for optogenetic clinical trials. AJOB Neuroscience. doi:10.1080/21507740.2014.911213.

    Google Scholar 

  23. Scanfeld, Daniel, Vanessa Scanfeld, and Elaine Larson. 2010. Dissemination of health information through social networks: Twitter and antibiotics. American Journal of Infection Control. doi:10.1016/j.ajic.2009.11.004.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Robillard, Julie, Thomas Johnson, Craig Hennessey, Lynn Beattie, and Judy Illes. 2013. Aging 2.0: health information about dementia on Twitter. PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069861.

    Google Scholar 

  25. Krippendorff, Klaus, 2007. Computing Krippendorff’s alpha reliability. Departmental Papers (ASC). http://repository.upenn.edu/asc_papers/43/. Accessed 21 July 2016.

  26. Keller, Brett, Alain Labrique, Kriti Jain, Andrew Pekosz, and Orin Levine. 2014. Mind the gap: social media engagement by public health researchers. Journal of Medical Internet Research. doi:10.2196/jmir.2982.

    Google Scholar 

  27. Purcell-Davis, Allyson. 2013. The representations of novel neurotechnologies in social media: five case studies. The New Bioethics: A Multidisciplinary Journal of Biotechnology and the Body 19: 30–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Pearce, Warren, Kim Holmberg, Iina Hellsten, and Brigitte Nerlich. 2014. Climate change on Twitter: topics, communities and conversations about the 2013 IPCC Working Group 1 report. PLoS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094785.

    Google Scholar 

  29. Waters, Richard, and Jensen Williams. 2011. Squawking, tweeting, cooing, and hooting: analyzing the communication patterns of government agencies on Twitter. Journal of Public Affairs. doi:10.1002/pa.385.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Annice, Kim, Heather Hansen, Joe Murphy, Ashley Richards, Jennifer Duke, and Jane Allen. 2013. Methodological considerations in analyzing Twitter data. JNCI Monographs. doi:10.1093/jncimonographs/lgt026.

    Google Scholar 

  31. Mislove, Alan, Sune Lehmann, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, and J. Niels Rosenquist. 2011. Understanding the demographics of Twitter users. In: Fifth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

    Google Scholar 

  32. Sloan, Luke, Jeffrey Morgan, Peter Burnap, and Matthew Williams. 2015. Who tweets? Deriving the demographic characteristics of age, occupation and social class from Twitter user meta-data. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115545.

    Google Scholar 

  33. Smith, Joanna, and Smith, Aaron. 2012. Twitter use 2012. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewinternet.org/2012/05/31/twitter-use-2012/. Accessed 3 August 2016.

Download references

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Dr. Judy Illes, Professor of Neurology and Director of the National Core for Neuroethics at the University of British Columbia and Canada Research Chair in Neuroethics, for providing insightful comments on the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Core for Neuroethics, Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health, 2215 Wesbrook Mall, University of British Columbia, Room 3450D, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada

    Julie M. Robillard, Cody Lo & Tanya L. Feng

  2. Department of Energy, Electrical and Computer Engineering, British Columbia Institute of Technology, 3700 Willingdon Avenue, Burnaby, BC, V5G 3H2, Canada

    Craig A. Hennessey

Authors
  1. Julie M. Robillard
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Cody Lo
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Tanya L. Feng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Craig A. Hennessey
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Julie M. Robillard.

Ethics declarations

Funding

This study was funded by a grant from the Stem Cell Network, a Canadian Network of Centres of Excellence, and by the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, the Foundation for Ethics and Technology and the Vancouver Coastal Research Institute.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Robillard, J.M., Lo, C., Feng, T.L. et al. “A Light Switch in the #Brain”: Optogenetics on Social Media. Neuroethics 9, 279–288 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9276-5

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-016-9276-5

Keywords

Search

Navigation