Academia.edu and online professional isolationism

I recently discovered Academia.edu, an online social network that “helps academics answer the question ‘Who’s researching what?’”. I’ve blogged about how scientists are behind the online social networking curve before, and numbers back up my observations, so I was interested to see if this network might help. I don’t think it does.

Let’s start with the name. The name and mission don’t match, implying non-academic research doesn’t count. It’s clear the creators haven’t thought of federal and other government scientists, not to mention non-government organizations, and consulting firms that publish. I say that because the structure of the network is based on placing yourself within Universities and then Departments. You can be a faculty, post-doc, graduate student, or other. So where do I fit?

The best I can do is enter “United States Environmental Protection Agency” as a university. The department is less clear. For better or worse, this is where I fit in the Agency: Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, National Exposure Research Laboratory, Ecological Exposure Research Division, Ecosystem Research Branch. And yes, each level has a manager. If the agency is analagous to a university, then ORD is analagous to a college, and thus not included in the site’s hierarchy. But is the lab or division analagous to a department? I’ve gone with the lab as a department. Better would be to change “University” to the more general “Institution”, and add levels of organization to the hierarchy. “Faculty” could be changed to “Primary Investigator”.

Online social networks are only useful if people you want to connect with are also part. This represents a fundamental problem for such sites, i.e. many people will join only after a critical threshold of apparent usefulness is reached, but you can’t get there unless people join. Moreover, people use networks for different purposes, confusing their utility. I, for example, reserve Facebook for friends and family, and use LinkedIn for professional contacts, whereas some use Facebook for business contacts, and other just collect “friends” as a hobby. The problem with LinkedIn for me as a scientist has been the relatively low number of scientist-members, hence the critical-threshold problem for colleagues who see little use for it or other online social networks. This is supremely ironic  because the internet’s primitive ancestor, the Arpanet, was created by researchers for researchers.

Academia.com might appear to be a solution, especially if many scientists join, but there is a cost. The site serves to preserve academic isolationism. If the apparent target audience joins and uses this social network to the exclusion of others, academics will have successfully created a virtual ivory tower. To be sure, no single online social network serves all purposes. Indeed, it will be many years, if ever, before competition among online social networks shakes out. After all, MySpace, once king among kids, appears to be seriously faltering. What then should one do? We have a few choices: join nothing, join everything, or join selectively. If teh internets scares you, by all means join nothing. But neither can anyone be expected to join everything. So the logical course of action is to experiment with a few selected networks and see what develops. Indeed, site development is a dynamic process occurring between site administrators and the membership, so you can influence the process by participating. Joining only one, especially academia.com, will only serve to isolate you and scientists in general. In an age where science is highly relevant to our daily lives, yet where funding is not keeping pace, and scientific illiteracy abounds, online isolationism is the last thing the scientific community needs.

I advocate for LinkedIn because of its features, because certain critical thresholds have already be crossed namely popularity among non-scientific professionals, and because we need to engage this community. Therefore we’d be better served by adding scientific functionality to existing networks, through the creation of scientifically oriented widgets for example, than building new networks.