Social Networking for Academics and Scholars

“Throughout my first year of graduate school, I was advised to use Social Media as an opportunity to both showcase my accomplishments, and connect and expand my professional network.  Given its potential for collaboration, building connections, and exchanging information and ideas, can academics and scholars similarly utilize social media to improve scholarship?  Why not?!  Sure enough, several social media sites already exist solely for connecting academics and supporting scholarly endeavors!  Here are a few... The above websites offer functions uniquely advantageous to scholars, especially Zotero’s and Mendeley’s reference manager programs.  But if social media specific to scholarship is to succeed, it needs to create opportunities and benefits that further knowledge in ways traditional methods cannot or it would take a lot longer to do... But keep this in mind, a new generation of graduate students are entering academia having built online brands, developed skills in navigating and connecting in social media like Facebook and LinkedIn, and whose norm is to socialize on the internet.  Why wouldn’t this upcoming generation of scholars use such a skill-set as they are advancing in their academic careers, especially given how competitive the academic world is (i.e. Publish or Perish)?  While, it is far too early to say if scholarly social media sites will become the respected norm, especially given the strong sense of tradition in scholarship, one cannot deny it will have some sort of role.”