The proverbial wisdom is that the great majority of academic journal articles will only be read ‘by a handful of people’. The numbers are there to back up this folk fact. But if only one of those readers–who will, most likely, be a scholar or specialist on the hunt for ideas that they themselves can use–decides to cite that article in a piece of their own, the ideas and concepts in the original idea have the opportunity to spread. And, in fact, such citations often generate more readers for the original article because they stand as a kind of verification of the usefulness or perspicacity of its content. And once the ideas begin to spread, who knows where they’ll end up. Academics are made to feel pathetic about the statistics on journal article readership, but it takes only one reader to push your pathetic ideas into circulation. Having your idea circulating in the history of ideas is nothing to sneeze at, so stop feeling sorry for yourself and tell that wet blanket to eat its statistics.
plastic bodies
thinking about material identities
I added a related thought to:
http://www.bogost.com/blog/writing_books_people_want_to_r.shtml