Why Publish When You Can Just Twitter?

What's all that tweeting you hear? Oh, just the sounds of my fifteen minutes of fame getting used up. I'm not complaining. The following is proof that Twitter truly is the most powerful benevolent de-centralized (human-made) force in the universe.
It goes like this...

In August, Ian and I start working on a paper about Joss Whedon's series Firefly, to submit to the Whedon panel at the Southwest/Texas American & Popular Culture Association's Annual Conference. Then we write it. Then we go to the conference. We have a great time, we email the paper to a couple people we meet there. We talk about editing it so we can submit it for publication somewhere like the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture. But the re-formatting alone would take major thought, and Kj's still only halfway through a crazy spring term. So we hold onto the paper with an ellipses as to what to do with it next.But in July (last Monday to be exact), we re-deliver our paper presentation along with a film screening at MHGS. Josué suggests we include a write up about the event for the new Experience MHGS website. He goes ahead and makes a paper link in case someone wants to read it. I think, "That's awfully nice, but who that's investigating MHGS is gonna read a 35 page paper about fundamentalism and a cancelled TV show?"

But I go ahead and tweet the link to the EMHGS site.
Then this happens. My initial tweet is way down there on the bottom, then next thing you know, It's on Whedonesque, the ultimate Whedonverse hub for both fandom and academia. So within a few hours, it went from living in my docs file to being accessible to every hardcore Whedon fan on the planet. By the time I got out of bed, it already had a comment stream 30 posts long.

So no more wondering who our audience is for this thing. It's out there. They're reading it, and they're already debating everything from the specifics of taking holy orders, to mind-reading to biblical innerancy, (not to mention finding all our typos).

Oh mighty Twitter. Thanks for getting us out there. You put a skip in my step all day. Tweet tweet tweet.