Self-publication
What happens when there is no single Scholarly Community (if there ever was)? What happens when publishers are not willing to take chances on small circulation?
In terms of scholarship, that situation begins to look like the intellectual scene during the early modern age, when the scholarly journal was being invented and there were no academic publishers. At that time everyone (Descartes, Montaigne, Leibniz, Locke, Hobbes, you name them) self-published their works. They hired printers; they did not work through editors or university presses.
More recently the standard model (for instance, in philosophy) has been: Gatekeeping by a small group (editors and review board), then publishing to a potentially wide audience, then filtering by reviewers and by who refers to the new work (with reviewers themselves ranked).
A newer model (for instance, in some areas of physics) is: Self-publish preprints immediately to the alpha researchers. Get feedback, revise, resend. Later, submit for publication in the standard way to a wider group. Peer review occurs "officially" at this point. Later still, filter by how much the article is referred to.
An even newer model (for instance, in blogs and web publication) is: Self-publish "for everyone" but in effect for a narrow audience. Get feedback and write either new items or revisions of the old. (There are arguments over the ethics of revising blog entries.) Filtering occurs through frequency of linkage. where linkers are themselves ranked by automated statistical measures.
In this case, as in advertising, and at a faster pace than in older academic publishing, there is meme creation and spreading. Catchy titles for postings, repetition of phrases, and the use of striking images. This resembles what Walter Ong describes as tactics for the creation of memorable oral materials amid the oral plenitude of a pre-literate society, but now the flow the tactics try to stand out from is the flow of text and image on the net. (See Ong 1988
The informal writing and self-publication that is held to be inferior to "official" juried scholarly writing actually enables and allows scholarly publication to function by providing connection to life and to daily scholarly activity and choices.