Popular culture is not all instant gratifications. Think of the elaborate and sometimes frustrating worlds someone enters when she becomes an expert fan of a sport team, or becomes involved with a set of fictional characters. How does the world of the Trekkies or the baseball fans become more self-aware and complex?
Not by having learned essays published in university journals where the fans will never encounter them.
Maybe, though, by having on the fan pages hypertext links to, among other things, such essays.
Imagine there were links to such analyses from inside the world, on its web sites or flowing across the bottom of the TV screen during the rerun. Imagine that debate about such analyses happened at Star Trek conventions, and the dialogue overflowed the academic borders in both directions.