The era of those who walk with their heads tilted downward is recent. Just 25 years ago, we watched television screens with devotion. In 2001, television was the main source of information and entertainment, but its influence has long since declined, handing over the baton to the Internet. The arrival of the Internet surprised us, but we quickly made its possibilities our own and incorporated its use into our daily lives.

Today, two thirds of the world’s population connects to the Internet; that is, around 5.4 billion people browsing the web. According to the National Statistics Institute (INE), by the end of 2025, 95.5% of the population aged 16 to 74 in the Basque Country connected to the Internet regularly, and 90.6% did so at least five times a week.

But what do we connect for? Data indicates three major blocks of activity: communication, information, and banking transactions. Thus, 96% of Internet users use the web to communicate, 88% to search for information, and 75% to access online banking.

FROM IN-PERSON TO DIGITAL

Communication has been the backbone on which the Internet has been built since its inception. The web was not conceived as an accumulation of consumers, entities, or companies, but as a multitude of conversations among people with shared interests, who exchanged information in ways different from the traditional ones: sending emails and messages, sharing images and videos, or publishing content, for example, on a blog.

Blogs have made it possible to cross geographical boundaries without leaving home. These digital publications have opened the borders for activities such as science communication, allowing them to travel to the digital universe in which millions of people travel every day from lecture halls where talks happen, the libraries that house scientific publications, or from classrooms where the reasons behind things are explained.

In September 2013, the blog Zientzia Kaiera (https://zientziakaiera.eus) was born. It was the third blog launched by the Chair of Scientific Culture of the University of the Basque Country (EHU), a medium published entirely in Basque that, since its beginnings, has brought to light a piece of science communication every single day. Zientzia Kaiera publishes content 365 days a year and, at the beginning of 2026, has already surpassed 4,400 published articles.

A DIGITAL NOTEBOOK OF “THINGS” ABOUT SCIENCE

Data from studies on the social perception of science conducted since 2010 showed that in Euskal Herria the population held a positive view of science and that interest in scientific and technological topics was on the rise. On the other hand, although sports, health, leisure, and economics captured most of the attention of Internet users, issues related to biology, astronomy, or genetics were awakening growing interest. And this attention did not come only from adults; young people were also paying attention to scientific topics, whether due to their studies or to keep up with technological advances.

Zientzia Kaiera began its journey by setting as its target audience those studying secondary education, teachers in that field, and anyone with an interest in both classic scientific topics (such as the history of science) and current ones. Thus, since September 2013, every day at exactly 9:00 a.m., a new publication premieres on the blog’s homepage. The topics and formats vary from day to day.

The blog publishes everything from short science-communication articles of between 600 and 800 words, of varying levels of difficulty and written by journalists, researchers, or science communicators, to animated videos about the history of science, infographics explaining how things work, or summer pastimes to exercise the mind during holidays. It is a blog of “things” about science, varied in topics and formats, with some more serious pieces and others lighter in tone. On Zientzia Kaiera one can find everything from reviews of children’s science books, glossaries on meteorology, news about the latest discoveries, to series of articles on the foundations of quantum physics.

SUSTAINING OUR SMALL WORLD

Zientzia Kaiera has an average of 35,000 visitors per year, who consume close to 210,000 pages and carry out approximately 178,000 readings. If we compare these figures with the traffic of large websites, it is clear that they do not amount to a downpour of numbers; but even a light drizzle soaks in.

Zientzia Kaiera is an example that projects based on constant and sustained activity over time, with diverse and varied content, survive the fleeting fashions of the Internet. And they survive thanks to a small but great community that sustains them. A community that shares a common interest: scientific knowledge.

Within this community coexist those who communicate and write about topics from any field of knowledge and those who consume the content because they are interested or want to learn. The blog brings together those who have committed to bringing science closer to their immediate environment in a natural way, making knowledge known in Basque, and those who seek information in a language that, despite its small size, encompasses everything that concerns us.

Communicating science in Basque means integrating science into everyday life, making it accessible to the context and linguistic reality of its environment, and addressing the community on equal footing. As Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera, professor of Linguistics at the Autonomous University of Madrid, points out in La dignidad e igualdad de las lenguas. Crítica de la discriminación lingüística (Alianza Editorial, 2016), communicating in the languages native to a place is an exercise in “horizontal exchange” that fosters accessibility to content, understanding among speakers, and linguistic equality. Because communicating science means facilitating information to promote knowledge, knowledge that takes up no space and whose language is universal.