It’s a well-established truth that the easiest way to get attention is to get in the way. Crashing the seamless background against which our lives play out will do it. If you’re lucky, you get incorporated into the foreground for a little while. Otherwise, you’re a problem; you’ll get fixed and the reaffixed.
Now, writing is a great vehicle for getting in the way. We have more ways now for anyone to send text in the direction of hypothetical eyeballs than at perhaps any other time since people first thought to exchange marks on media. But you have to understand “audience” before you can understand any one audience. When you want to move people, having a sense of their ideas, background assumptions, and expectations is oftentimes better than anything you could learn from, say, demographics.
Demographics can get you started, to be sure, but the way people group themselves is always based on ideas and expectations anyway. Better off starting there in the first place.
Hear me if you’ve stopped this before.
All Across Learning 
I think we see this playing out a lot in quick post online magazines, etc. – oftentimes I feel like a post or article is aimed squarely at a box of people (I’m looking at you, The Root) rather than a self-assembled tribe. I feel like figuring out the tribe and how it assembled is the tricky (and interesting) part.
Even more interesting might be find yourself “surfaced” as part of an unexpected tribe.
“Hey, I didn’t expect to be here!”
“dude…i *am* totally a black technologist..!”
I remember that one!