I listen to the radio to help me focus on work. The station I often choose is called Absolute 80s and essentially plays the same ‘Best of the 80s’ CD collection on shuffle every day as far as I can tell. During the adverts, a narrator beckons me to join “Real Dating for Real People”. No thank you, I am a happily married man, I reply, and besides, if I was looking I’d be looking for a dating agency just for an imaginary girlfriend. The station’s ident, I think now voiced by Julian Barratt, then tells me “Absolute 80s, where real music matters” before they play the theme from Ghostbusters.

I’ve always found the way advertisers use language fascinating. For example, around about when Michael Gove unhelpfully spouted “People have had enough of experts” ushering in the erosion of trust in evidence-based approaches, toothpaste commercials transitioned from phrases like “scientifically formulated” and “chosen by experts” to “pro-experts”, and eventually to “professionally formulated”. The term professional seemingly became more palatable than scientific and expert – I tried using this on my online profiles, labelling myself as a ‘professional researcher’ rather than as a scientist.

It would seem today that ‘real’ is an favoured buzzword for advertisers. They are usually well informed about the zeitgeist and they are tapping into a genuine desire for experiences that are genuine, authentic, and human. The digital world has transformed the way we live – and artificial/abominable intelligence (AI) is transforming it again – yet this yearning for connection, for authenticity, for realness, will always win through. But in our digital and AI dominated world, what is ‘real’?

Objects are real.

In The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, he described this as “digital is the peak of convenience, analog is the peak of experience.” Sax places this in the context of the renaissance of vinyl records, sales of which have increased year on year for the last 18 years – he highlights a preference for the richer sound quality and being able to hold, and own, an object – a tangible, tactile thing. There is also a connection here – the music is played live, the very vibrations carving the grooves into a master that is then used to press the records, whose grooves return the original vibrations into music. Thus, a record has an echo of the liveness of the performance. You can run your fingers over the surface of a record, feel the grooves on your skin, and be connected with its creator. Contrast that to a CD or digital file. They are just data transformed multiple times and estranged from their creators.

In the realm of games, there has also been a resurgence for analogue, with the market for board games set to grow from $21bn in 2023 to $41bn in 2029. This isn’t at the expense of digital games either, whose market value far exceeds this and also continues to grow.

There is a strong desire for people to make and build. I love Warhammer – I do not play that often but I like to build and paint their model kits. Despite competition from digital gaming, and predictions 3D printing will kill their business model, parent company Games Workshop are posting year-on-year increases in sales and profits. The doomsayers wanting to write the companies eulogy fail to understand the enduring desire for the tactile – to feel and make things with your own hands and the joy that gives you. Some people call it the Ikea Effect. To me it’s obvious, for example, you cannot replicate the feeling of building a model airplane kit by building a digital model, or even printing out solid components of resin. The experiences are entirely different.

Craft is real.

Recently as I was wasting time in the evening by browsing YouTube I was reminded of the simple pleasure of seeing someone who is very good at their job being very good at their job. I watched Sarah Natochenny, the voice actor for Ash Ketchum on the Pokemon cartoon, being asked to improvise voices for characters she has only just seen. I love watching her facial expressions as she processes, imagines, then embodies the character, giving them not just a voice but a whole personality and back story. She has a craft, she is good at it, and its delightful to see her expressing that craft and me then thinking ‘wow, there’s no way I could do that’.

We will always be delighted by talented people showing off their talent and seeing something incredible being done for real. Even though Harry Palmer will always be my favourite spy, I do enjoy the Bond films. A huge part of their appeal is the action and the real stunts. When you see the Hornet X car do a mid-air corkscrew across a river in The Man with the Golden Gun it is because someone actually did that – it was planned on a computer and there is special FX trickery but ultimately, someone got in that car and drove it up the ramp. This was a rule for Bond films – the action was as authentic as possible. This was regrettably forgotten in the resultingly awful, CGI-riddled Die Another Day, something which will have been noted on Bond’s B107.

Both together are super-real.

The first Wallace & Gromit film, A Grand Day Out, was released, rather terrifyingly, in 1989. It used a painstakingly detailed process of stop motion animation and clay models to bring characters to life and tell the story. Each clay model is sculpted and manipulated by hand – a thing, an object, produced and controlled by someone good at their craft. At Christmas 2024, the latest instalment of the story, Vengeance Most Fowl, became the BBC’s most viewed scripted show since 2002 at a time when TV viewership is declining. Although now augmented with model digital effects, the heart of its production, and its lasting appeal, is that craft and the things it creates.

I don’t want you to mistake this as a false-nostalgia fuelled rant against the use computer animations and CGI. I love those too and my favourite shows as a kid included the vanguard of these, Reboot and Insektors. The point I am trying to make is that there is a still a space for hand-crafted shows and films to cut through –  Recently, the restored 1983 pilot of the original Thomas the Tank Engine show, made using real models of trains and landscapes, has been viewed over 1.6m in the last month of YouTube.

Realness in Science Communication.

Good science communication connects people to science and in particular to the scientists involved. People want to see the ‘realness’ of science, experiencing it in a genuine and authentic way. They want to know the stories of real scientists behind it.

My specialism in science communication has been game-based approaches at festival-style events. The sort of place where you get given a small 3x3m space, a trestle table, and present some form of tabletop activity. I’m probably best known for virtual reality activities in this spaces, such as Flash Flood! and Humber in a Box. There was an appeal for VR in the pre-pandemic era, which I was purposely tapping into but my bet would be this is nowhere near as strong now as it was back then as the novelty has worn off. However, other activities like the EmRiver mini-flume and AR Interactive Sandbox have a timeless popularity owing to their tactile, hands-on approach. If I was doing similar work these days, I’d be focussing on my physical demo work and storytelling, for example Earth Arcade: The Forest.

Science is a craft. It is not easy and it needs years of training, mentorship, and practice to master. We often forget this. Like any craft, people want to see scientists being good at science. In our efforts to make science sharable and understandable we should not lose sight of also needing to amaze people into saying ‘wow, there’s no way I could that’. This may seem counter-intuitive because part of the role of a science communicator is to inspire people to be scientists, but I think this is where inspiration comes from – if I was younger and was better at doing voices, I might instead watch Sarah’s video and say ‘wow, that’s so awesome I want to be able to do that’.

Science communication becomes really special when someone is able to bring together their craft for science and another craft. Sam Illingworth is a scientist and poet and a science-poet. Rolf Hut is scientist and a maker and a science MacGyver. Iris Van Zelst is a scientist and games developer and science-games developer. There is a growing movement of scientists expressing their crafts and research through science-art, including these examples from former colleagues at the University of Hull I had the pleasure of writing about.

As AI becomes more embedded in real-life, as every YouTube thumbnail or LinkedIn ‘thought leader’ relies on increasingly samey AI generated visual slop, and as online writing becomes ever more generic and unimaginative, people will increasing seek a connection to the authentic, the genuine, the real. It might not seem so now, but the desire for tactile objects and demonstrable craft will surge in the future. Science communicators, hold your nerve.