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Media Appearances
Delighted to be interviewed by Fortune magazine writer Jonathan Vanian on what Clubhouse means for our future in social media. Audio communities are doing incredibly well at the moment, signalling a desire for retreating from video into the less intense, more intimate space of sound. The full article is behind a pay wall, but here’s the link.
A few weeks ago, I was interviewed for an article in the Washington Post, written by Nick Busca, who does fantastic work writing about new technology. You can access the article here (hopefully!)
I’m really excited to announce my involvement with a remarkable new tv series titled “Man 2.0” Across a number of episodes, I talk about how the human condition is being transformed by technology and what this means for our future. It’s currently being distributed worldwide, so may not yet be in your country, but you can see a trailer here.
Great to see this write up from our AI for Good event last week. An excellent summary of what we covered.
I was delighted to be a part of this BBC radio programme, especially since my dear friend Dr Mahfoud Amara is also interviews.
Why is watching sport so important to us as a species? And what happens when that experience is taken away from us? Award-winning sports journalist and broadcaster Clare Balding explores why sport plays such a crucial role in shaping society, speaking to a field of global experts and elite sportspeople, including Martina Navratilova.
In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic abruptly put a stop to virtually all sporting activity across the globe – and left vast numbers of people staring into an existential void. In sport’s absence, we’ve been hungrily reliving past contests, debating hypothetical scenarios, and doing everything we can to plug the hole in our lives. The crisis has shown how our relationship with sport dominates our lives and our media, our conversations and our leisure time. In this documentary, Clare Balding talks to figures from the worlds of anthropology, philosophy and human behaviour to try to figure out why experiencing sport is so meaningful to us, whether we’re in a crowd, or one of millions following on television and social media.
Her interviewees include the sociologists Akilah Carter-Francique, Mahfoud Amara and Ramachandra Guha; anthropologist Leila Zaki Chakravarty; and philosophers Heather Reid and Andy Martin – who unpick the myriad ways in which our love of sport is deeply embedded in human experience and history, and how our consumption of it has shaped modern society.
Cognitive neuroscientist Sophie Scott reveals what we know about what happens in our brains as we watch sport, whilst bioethicist and technology expert Andy Miah tells Clare how cutting-edge digital advances and the new world of eSports are changing the relationship between fan and sporting event forever.
An Overcoat Media Production for BBC World Service. Produced by Steven Rajam Photo: Liverpool fans at Anfield, Credit: Tembele Bohle, Pexels
We’ve spent the last decade being anxious about the increasing amount of time young people spend in front of screens. However, in the last two months, children have been encouraged to dive into digital like never before. This has thrown up all kinds of questions about how to keep well online in a time where being outside and together in physical space has been impossible.
Parents have sought to employ digital platforms any way they can to ensure their children remain intimately connected to their friends, fearful of the time they are missing socialising, playing, learning and sharing.
Where previously we may have been sceptical of digital learning compared to face-to-face experiences, it has become central to children’s homeschooling and a great deal of positives have come out of it. In addition to work set by schools, children in the UK and across the world have engaged with new teachers. Many have been exercising with Joe Wicks or doing maths with Carol Vorderman.
These digital learning experiences have been the best option for children under lockdown, yet this is hard to reconcile with our previous worries about limiting screen time. Seemingly overnight, even organisations that had warned us about being in digital space too much now advocate their use.
The World Health Organization, for example, has been working with gaming companies as a way of promoting key COVID-19 health messages. This comes less than two years after it identified excessive gaming as a possible health disorder. While this partnership is far from a general policy on promoting gaming for health, it has sent the message that gaming is an important way to maintain mental health during a long period of social isolation.
With social distancing and homeschooling likely to be a feature of children’s lives for some time yet, we need new ways to think about the time young people spend in digital space. Some helpful guidance can be found in a 2019 report published by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Public Health, which outlined guidance for children’s screen use.
The report did not specify putting time limits on screen time, nor did it say that certain kinds of screen exposure are worse or better than others. Instead, it invited families to talk about their collective screen health together and discuss when it seemed to be making family time worse. The report invited families to ask themselves four questions:
Answering these questions in 2020 feels like a very different exercise, but they’re still a really great place to start when helping children – and adults – through this difficult period.
One of the big challenges for researchers right now is understanding the impact of the extra screen time young people are experiencing during lockdown. We have no precedents for such conditions and most of the research on screen time is still in the context of a life where a big part of a child’s day is within a school setting.
For this reason, we need more data to understand how the extra screen time is affecting young people, but it’s reasonable to conclude that it all depends how that screen time is orchestrated. For example, being in front of a Joe Wicks workout and doing exercise is likely a very different category of experience than being on social media.
This is why active gaming and even virtual reality experiences could usher in an entirely new way of thinking about the screen and its impact on our lives. We already have evidence that active gaming experiences can promote physical wellbeing.
It’s also worth thinking about how this time offers an opportunity to completely rethink what and how we learn. Children can access lessons and courses from all over the world, which provides a chance for them to engage with children and teachers from other countries. Even astronauts on the International Space Station have been reading stories to children.
Through all of this, it’s crucial to remember that we’re not simply homeschooling or working from home, but trying hard to do these things in extraordinary times. In the rush to maintain standards and normality, we need to remember that a completely different approach is perfectly okay right now.
Andy Miah, Chair in Science Communication & Future Media, University of Salford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Had a great conversation with Dr Alex Fenton and Ryan Mayer about how technology is helping sports figure out their Covid-19 strategy. Check out the full article here and a little video about the article below
I’m really delighted to have published this op ed for CLOT magazine and, especially, to have discovered their wonderful publication through this opportunity. it’s a fantastic site with some amazing articles about incredible art work. This intro into drone art covers one of the major chapters of my new book on DRONES. It’s the chapter that describes where I began with drones and I’m especially attached to it, as it was where I began working with some amazing and lovely people. Check it out HERE.
It’s a really tough time for everyone right now, not least of which is just making sure we are all are keeping healthy, fed, and taking care of ourselves more generally. Universities have been turned upside down and a lot of us are trying to focus on supporting colleagues and students to get through this time, along with being full time carers.
For me personally, research is an important way to stay to stay mentally balanced and so I’ve gone through some real soul searching to figure out what it is about my work that I think still matters.
I wrote this article in the hope that it might allow some of my colleagues to feel that their research still matters. I come from a wide educational background and really want to ensure that all the wonderful work we do in disciplines that are not at all related to this awful crisis is still allowed to continue.
Very excited to publish this article for the Design Exchange, bringing together some of my thoughts about esports and architecture. Some wider work developing around this theme. Check out the article here
Recently spoke to DeZeen magazine about stories regarding China’s use of drones to police citizens in the context of the coronavirus. The big story here isn’t really that this may be happening, but that the utilisation of drones by a range of enforcement services is likely to become commonplace and has been enabled by a growing utilisation of drones within military operations.
Zoltan Istvan has attracted a lot of attention in recent years for being the world’s first transhumanist politician. This thoughtful article gives some insight into how transhumanism gained momentum over the last 20 years and what it still needs to go further.
I’m very proud to have published an article about Drones in The Big Issue. The article tells a bit of the story of my journey into this world, leading up to the publication of my new book, which spans everything from environmental research to military applications and artistic works.
I recently interview for Ubeat, a Spanish esports OTT platform, which featured a film on the relationship between sports and esports. I spoke about the growing range of immersive experiences that are developing around the esports world and how these are beginning to approximate the kinds of things we do in sports.
We can draw a long line of interest in such forms of gaming from Dance Revolution to Nintendo Wii and to Pokemon Go. Bringing physical activity closer to the gaming space is one of my key areas of focus for the next couple of years and it’s such a compelling proposition, as we move into a world that is increasingly anxious about sedentary lifestyles and excessive mobile phone usage,
Here’s the video! And thanks to Emma, who set up the opportunity and produced the content, and to David and the team at Salford University for shooting the film for me during our Virtual Reality Fitness Marathon.
Check out our wider esports work over at Esports Science Insights.
Delighted to have another article published in The Conversation, focused on esports and the prospects of virtual reality. Take a peek here
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been diving into TikTok, lecturing about it, writing, and trying to figure out what space there is for scholars to be present. It’s not a simple one to solve, but I think we need to understand how the consumption of media content is changing and so I put this at the heart of this article for the Times Higher. More writing on this to follow, but here’s the link to the article.
Great to have recorded this episode with the Level Up Human crew and the amazing Sarah Withers from Salford.
Great to see this article in The Week focus on a subject close to my heart. Hard to believe I’ve been writing about this for 20 years now. So much has happened over that period and this article captures a number of the crucial viewpoints across this subject.
Citation: Miah, A. (2019) Good Science Begins with Communication, Times Higher Education, Available at: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/good-science-begins-communication
Recently on Twitter, a debate took place over advice from Professor Jim Al-Khalili, professor of physics and public engagement in science at the University of Surrey, that a practising scientist should establish themselves before aiming to go too far down the road in communicating science.
While much of the debate was based on just a brief clip from a wider talk, the less generous Twitterati felt that Al-Khalili’s statement discouraged spending time on science communication until one is well into postdoc years, once a good amount of grants and publications were out there proving one’s credentials.
The more generous Twitter users felt that his advice was more that one should practise as a scientist first, before making a huge move into a completely new profession, especially if one’s core currency will be in the accumulation of research funding and publications.
Yet, even though this may sound strategically sensible, it neglects the value of ensuring that the public are part of the entire research process from day one. To rearrange a well-known quote from Sir Mark Walport, chief executive of UK Innovation and Research, good science begins with communication. It is not something we should do just at the end of the process. As researchers, this principle must be our starting point.
However, this reasoning is not just a matter of ensuring that the public are part of decision-making hierarchies about science. Rather, it’s important because formal structures around scientists today require them to ensure that they have impact journeys for their research, from the point of inception. This is especially the case now with the research excellence framework, where impact has become an even bigger part of how research is evaluated.
A well-regarded scientist is, increasingly, someone who is publicly visible, willing to be present in the media, and someone who co-authors with their research users. In fact, some journals, such as the British Medical Journal, actively encourage co-produced research “with patients, carers, or members of the public”. These best practice guidelines could well become conditions of publication in the future.
I began my PhD when the World Wide Web was becoming established and this was extremely empowering as a researcher. We suddenly had our own means of communicating directly with the public, rather than having to rely on editors, broadcasters or the news cycle. Today, we can make our own documentaries, publish on our own channels and create our own podcasts.
Many young scientists in particular are taking hold of this with both hands, creating extraordinary content around their research, rewriting Wikipedia pages, working with artists and creating entirely new platforms that make science more accessible. More importantly, they are taking up the mantle of immersing themselves within public life, occupying the role of the public intellectual, a function which is of increased importance now in an era of fake news and post-truth.
Far from being a choice, we need to think about communication as a necessity to scientists’ jobs that is given adequate time in their workload.
Fortunately, funding councils understand this and have ensured that time, funds and thought are given to how their funded projects will connect with the public. It is also important to note that there are many ways to do science communication. One doesn’t have to be the next Brian Cox or Alice Roberts.
Over my own career, I have worked across a range of creative communication formats, from producing theatrical performances about genetic enhancement and consulting on film and radio drama scripts, to exploring the science of falling in love over an evening with 30 dinner guests and developing virtual reality experiences.
It is the opportunity to be part of a wider conversation about how science is embedded within society that makes science communication so valuable.
Yet, the value that we all derive from seeing scientists work alongside the public is far more than just instrumental, it is an immense enrichment of research life. Recently, I worked with a team from the University of Salford at the Cheltenham Science Festival to present a new virtual reality experience that explains the science of the microbiome. An octogenarian had his first experience with VR there and it was science that brought him this opportunity.
Through such experiences scientists can discover why their work matters and how important it is to ensure that the public has an opportunity to talk with them about it. These experiences also cause one to reflect on their responsibilities as a researcher and to appreciate more clearly the fundamental needs of citizens for research.
While far more science communication happens today than ever before, we still have some way to go before it is available for everyone. That’s why it’s crucial to keep talking about the fact that there is more than one way to be a science communicator. It is possible to develop a science communication journey while you carry out scientific research from the very beginning of your career.
But, more importantly, if done well, science communication enriches the research we do and the significance of what we discover. It can also be really good fun.
Author Bio: Andy Miah is chair in science communication and future media in the School of Environment & Life Sciences at the University of Salford.
Alongside the publication of my paper on Gene Doping and Transhumanism, the amazing Nick Busca has published this article with One Zero.
I’ve really appreciated Medium for a while, but have dug into it much more since talking to Nick. It is a fantastic ecosystem for ideas.
