Numerous times throughout these columns I've noted that my readership is very limited, even close to non-existent. I've referred to them as my proverbial eight readers, and not counting the times I've used that phrase in this final column, by my count it shows up throughout The Boidem in 17 different columns - in some of them more than once. I readily admit that acknowledging my very limited readership is somewhat of a conceit.
It's not as though The Boidem is a total unknown. Obscure, perhaps, but not unknown. It's even garnered three academic footnotes, though until I started preparing this column I was aware of only one of those. I tell the story of the first footnote in the next to last column. What was perhaps most interesting about that footnote was how it showed that the internet can time travel. In the fourth edition of The Boidem I linked to Personal Home Pages and the Construction of Identities on the Web - an article by Daniel Chandler whom I described as one of the most interesting academics dealing with identity on the internet. That Boidem column was from 1996, and obviously, if I linked to Chandler's article, his was from before then. It seems, however, that in a later edition of that same article Chandler referred to my column. This caused me to note:
Perhaps more than the pride of the footnote, I was able to take a certain recursive pleasure in the fact that the footnote that referred to me appeared in the same article that I had referred to a couple of years earlier. That's not the easiest trick to pull off.It's my guess that my second footnote came about from someone who read Chandler, since he refers to that same Boidem column and also footnotes Chandler. It's in what seems to be a presentation at a conference in Brazil in 2002, and the article is in Portuguese. It's by André Lemos who today is a full professor in the Faculty of Communications at Federal University of Bahia, and seems like a very impressive person.
Gets read a bit? As you no doubt know - that's the part that I don't deal with. My stuff is out there ... waiting for some future doctoral student to stumble onto it and say "wow, why did this guy waste his time doing this?".And then, in September of last year, it sort of happened. I received a message with the subject line: Thoughts on the internet today...". It read:
Hello Mr. Hurvitz,I have no idea how that serendipitous search result happened. Quite a few times I've run a similar search, hoping to get a page from The Boidem high in the results. I haven't succeeded. I'm not, however, complaining.
I stumbled across the Boidem while doing research on research because with the adaptation of AI in today's world I don't think that anyone does their own research anymore. I thought that it could be a fun rabbit hole to find my way to the bottom of for my Labor day activity. I started with Googling the word research and at the bottom of the first page was the link "research?" with a bunch of Hebrew letters above it. So, I clicked on it and started reading your column titled "Too simple to teach." It was crazy to me that someone back in 2010 and earlier was already talking about the "microwaving" of informational discovery. I have read other columns and you seem to have a keen vision of what the internet was.
It has been sometime since your last column in 2016 and the world has only run with the informational wormhole that is the internet. As someone who was born post 2000 and has basically known nothing else than adapting to the new technology with no hang up or outside thought for the most part, I would love to know what your current thoughts are on how we interact with cyberspace today?
Thanks from your 9th reader,
Jacob