University of Oxford PhD student Andrew Bissette recently published a diatribe against the Internet's favorite form of looping media, arguing that science writers should not use GIFs to explain science. He's wrong. His heart is in the right place. His argument is even halfway sound. But he's wrong.
GIF Credit: Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which regularly features supplemental information that is both attention-grabbing and relevant. This particular excerpt is from the episode "Deeper, Deeper, Deeper Still"
Bissette's rant, which was ran yesterday at The Conversation, was inspired by a piece, recently published by Vox, titled "How scientists made a new chemical element, explained in GIFs." The Vox piece itself is fine. "Well written," even, says Bissette. What he takes issue with, however, are the GIFs that, as promised by the article's headline, are interspersed between its paragraphs.
Over the past few decades psychologists have built a considerable body of evidence showing that seductive detail is quite simply bad news. Research stretching back to the 1980s has consistently shown that the inclusion of seductive detail in educational courses adversely affects educational outcomes.
Including seductive details reduces the ability of students to learn and retain relevant educational material. Worse still, it negatively affects their ability to focus on and understand the material in the first place. Seductive details grab the interest of students – but it distracts them from the educational material.
It's important to note that Bissette is actually arguing two points here. The first is that attention-grabbing but irrelevant information is as ill-suited to science communication as it is to education. The second is that GIFs are attention-grabbing but irrelevant. And while we agree with his first point, we can't help but take issue with the second.
To be fair, Bissette's first point is well made when it comes to the Vox piece in question. The article uses looping animations from movies and TV shows to punctuate its main points, but does a spectacularly awful job doing so, using GIFs that are, at best, tangentially related to the subject at hand. For instance, when discussing the subject of "natural" versus "synthetic" elements, the Vox article uses a GIF from Seinfeld, in which a character played by Teri Hatcher refers to her real (i.e. "natural") breasts. The rest of the GIFs are even more far-fetched. They reach. They try too hard. They add nothing. Like bad metaphors, they seem more likely to distract the reader than help him understand the subject at hand.
But not all GIFs are "attention-grabbing but irrelevant." Like illustrations, graphs, videos, and many other visual aids, there are plenty of instances in which a GIF can actually enhance a reader's understanding of, or appreciation for, a subject. I use the GIF on the left all the time to help explain the "transit method," a process by which astronomers search for distant planets by detecting dips in a star's brightness when an orbiting planet passes between it and a telescope's line of sight. You can say what the transit method is, but if you can illustrate what a transit looks like (a silhouetted planet passing before its parent star), and how it registers to the detecting telescope (a dip on a graph of perceived brightness), the reader can get an even clearer idea of what it is you're talking about.
Who in their right mind would deprive her audience of looping-footage this fantastic?
In the end, Bissette's beef isn't so much with GIFs as it is impertinent, and ultimately distracting, supplemental information. That may seem obvious, but it's an important distinction to make at a time when these looping animations have become a ubiquitous form of online communication.
One of the main causal mechanisms proposed for the problem with seductive details is lack of text cohesion. So they're distracting not because they're there but because they're forced into the text unnecessarily or clumsily.
Including attention-grabbing but irrelevant details is bad practice in education, and it stands to reason that it won't work for science journalists either if our goal is to inform readers.
Which, sure. High five. I mean, who can really argue with that?