[nernst]

I'm fairly sure that line from Anthony Finkelstein is tongue-in-cheek.

Like any profession, academia is about networking. Social media can really help here, and I think academics are slowly understanding this. There are two problems: blogging/tweeting are lower priority than grant-writing, teaching, marking, and paper-writing; and academics are usually older and (in my experience) older people don't 'do' social media as much.

But in software engineering, at least, there is a good community of people on social media. For example, the Never Work In Theory blog (of which I'm an author), and various academics on twitter, like @profserious or @avandeursen.