How are tech-savvy Christian academics using the internet in 2012?

I received this question on email and thought I would post here the reply I sent:

How are tech-savvy Christian academics using the internet in 2012?

Because of the explosion of the internet in terms of so much information, there is a need for ways to filter through that information.

First, I see Christian academics who are tech-savvy reading the blogs of a few people in their specific field that they are really interested in. This supplements and highlights what to read in the journals in the field and highlights real world examples. Hopefully, many of the journal articles are now accessible online through library subscription services so can be read easily online.

Second, they read other websites and magazines such as Christianity Today and Books & Culture and Christian Century and Scot McKnight's Jesus Creed blog that point to interesting and solid articles of wider interest.

Third, they keep in touch informally and playfully (as they used to do with email lists) on Twitter. Some also use Facebook for academic banter but that has for many of us a more personal dimension (family, friends rather than intellectual colleagues).

See also:

• Duke New Testament professor Mark Goodacre has chronicled these changes in a few presentations at Society of Biblical Literature. He himself started out with email lists, then blogs, then New Testament Gateway, then Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts.
• Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College is a wonderful cultural critic and resource on these issues and is a heavy user of Twitter. Many are talking about his new book: Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.
• For a compilation of articles on the subject more broadly, see: Bauerlein, Mark. The Digital Divide : Arguments for and against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. New York Jeremy P. Tarcher, 2011.