Imagine if all the stories in your Facebook News Feed were 12 months old. People would be storming the steps of Congress, demanding change.
To play devil's advocate, the time lag forces your conversations to strive to a higher standard of quality, comprehensiveness, correctness, and context than Facebook updates could even be compared to.
Then again, striving for the higher standard also invents pseudosciences, bad stat, and outright fraud.
In short, I don't think the solution is to replace the paper with something instantaneous. I agree that instantaneous (public) communication could be better used in the academic community, but there's a trend that way already as blog posts begin to signal a certain kind of good advisor.
I especially don't agree that search engines have any business replacing peer review.
To play devil's advocate, the time lag forces your conversations to strive to a higher standard of quality, comprehensiveness, correctness, and context than Facebook updates could even be compared to.
Then again, striving for the higher standard also invents pseudosciences, bad stat, and outright fraud.
In short, I don't think the solution is to replace the paper with something instantaneous. I agree that instantaneous (public) communication could be better used in the academic community, but there's a trend that way already as blog posts begin to signal a certain kind of good advisor.
I especially don't agree that search engines have any business replacing peer review.