Scholarship and Social Media

As I often do in the morning, I looked at the most recent photo on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day archive and read a recent post on the Bad Astronomy blog (hosted by Discover magazine, and today has an awesome compilation of photos of the transit of Venus!) and I don't really make much of these activities except that it's nice to start the day with something beautiful and curious.

Then I came across this editorial on the Biological Bulletin: "It's Time To e-Volve: Taking Responsibility for Science Communication in a Digital Age".  In it, the author points to public perception of scientists as elitist and disengaged and to a survey where 66% of respondents couldn't/didn't attempt to name a living scientist (carried out by Reasearch!America, slide 51) and says that "we, as scientists, are failing at communicating science to the public", which seems to be a theme in our summer program (though expanding that goal to academic researchers in general).  To combat this, she looks particularly at the power of online media tools like Facebook, blogs, Twitter etc. for being the platform on which to "break down" research and "pull in" people.  

I'm curious to know if others have felt like they could (or want to) connect to the people or institutions they work with, the researchers they admire, or their field in general through these means?  What effect has it had on your interest?  Your perception of opportunities and opinions?  In general, how much outreach do people in your department participate in?  Have you ever come across a professor's blog?  How did that change your perception or interaction with them?

For me, I used to find the injection of social media (tiresome lexicon this has become!) into my education initially off-putting, as if it somehow cheapened the material (the same platform that can inform me that Snooki's pregnant also teaches me about sparse matrix properties!) and degraded the prospect of my induction into some cabal of knowledge, but I have almost always found it beneficial.  But I'm glad that the blog - as an invitation to understand or investigate something interesting alongside someone who knows and loves a subject - has loosened its topical boundaries.  They personally keep me excited about the field of physics (Someone took the time to illustrate the collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda as seen from Earth! How cool is that?!) in addition to uses for nutella.