That's where I'm from. The closest town is Milo. It's still on some maps but it isn't even a ghost town. There isn't anything there except a curiously fancy bridge across the river. The buildings are all gone, torn down or moved to other towns down stream. I suppose I truly am a local yokel.

Still, I may live to laugh about that.

We talked for two days about the effect that the new electronic archives and networked scholarship will have on the practices of scholarship, preservation, pedagogy, and publishing. Blah-de-incremental-blah. While there was an understanding of the importance of these huge archives, and the impact that improved access and availability will have internally on the system of four major academic players, nobody seemed to consider one crucial thing.

These resources are no longer geographically isolated. They’re in the system of pipes. Eventually, depending on either draconian licensing agreements or the diligence of lay competitors, they’re becoming available to the lay public.

They’re. On. The. Network. Not in a big impressive physical brick ivy-covered library. They’re online. In everybody’s home.

And when that has finally happened—while that is happening—the fifth and silent player will cease to be an innocuous bill-paying bystander. The lay public will become a core participant. Or competitor.

Forget ARPA: You and I, right now, are using a novel nonacademic channel for discourse, scholarly and otherwise. Forget ProQuest and ECCO and EEBO: We see online already innumerable efforts aimed at collaborative archiving and production of authoritative historical and genealogical texts outside the Academy. The barriers to entry for publishing are disappearing, as wikis and Lulu.com and every other damned Web thing drags the power movable type out of the clenched blue hands of the Northern European families that cornered the market centuries ago.

The fundamental effect that will come with public network availability of scholarly raw materials—whether that access is granted by the moneyed stakeholders, or comes from sidestep production of novel content by the lay public—has not yet been discussed. Networked electronic communications evaporate the costs of production and redistribution to make “books” (whatever they are) and “conversations” (whatever they are) free like beer, enabling independent publication, independent scholarship, independent pedagogy and discussion.

We didn’t talk about that, in all of two days supposedly focused on those very subjects. The word “public” did not enter into the equation at all. Why not? Maybe because I was sitting next to the only person in the room who is not a member of one those four classes of academic.

My wife is one of those public people, the ones who will shatter the connections between and barriers around that centuries-old four-way club. Not intentionally; not out of malice. As a consequence of her strength, intelligence, curiosity and diligence. She, and all the thousands of other unwitting members of the independent, educated, curious, intelligent, uncredentialled networked lay public will shatter the system… by accident. By access. By breaking its boundaries.

None of the traditional players seem to know this yet. Someday soon they’ll figure it out. One way or another. Network effects have a tendency to crystallize suddenly, as if from thin air. They catch everybody by surprise, when they hit.

That would be a pretty big exogenous factor. Lots of intricately detailed plans and models would implode. A very black swan would land on the pond. Expect it.