“Usenet won’t change your life,” said the supervisor to the graduate student. The year was 1993 and the student was me. Today that warning against time-wasting seems even more pertinent: new social media tools—Facebook, Twitter, weblogs—have so lowered communication barriers that anyone with an Internet connection or a smartphone can talk with anyone else—anytime, anywhere. Although this seems to fulfill Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the “read/write Web,” the resistance to using social media as a professional tool remains surprisingly strong.
A recent report by the Research Information Network finds that only a small fraction of researchers in the UK make frequent use of social media tools. And extrapolations and misinterpretations of blog posts by the mainstream media aren’t exactly encouraging scientists to jump into the fray. Virginia Heffernan, writing in the New York Times, wonders where the science is:
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