"Few laymen realized how tightly compartmentalized the scientific community had become, a battle ship with bulkheads sealed against leaks. Biologists had enough to read without keeping up with the mathematics literature -- for that matter, molecular biologists had enough to read without keeping up with population biology. Physicists had better ways to spend their time than sifting throught the meteorology journals. Some mathematicians would have been excited to see Lorenz's discovery; within a decade, physicists, astronomers, and biologists were seeking something just like it, and sometimes rediscovering it for themselves. But Lorenz was a meteorologist, and no one thought to look for chaos on page 130 of volume 20 of the Journal of Atmosphereic Sciences."

Hermann Hesse called this feuilletonism -- in essence, the needless shuffling about of papers, the beaurocratic tower of Babel that most information technology specialists have consigned themselves to being stuck in. This amounts to people writing theses about analyses of interpretations of reviews of critiques of actual original works written so long ago that all context and real, immediate, personal relevance has been lost. The nearest English translation for "feuilletonism" that I can muster is "paperocracy". I'm willing to go out on a limb here and make a value judgement: this is a *bad* thing.