mediation is a good thing, really

As the web got going, it was popular to presume that anyone creating anything would place it effortlessly onto the web, thus liberating art from the evil forces of so-called "mediators" who previously stood in between artists and their audiences in the past. Mediators are editors, publishers, producers, record companies--anyone not the artist him- or herself who might be seen as barrier to putting the art out there.

In the naive eyes of the technologists whose talents launched the web, this was considered a good thing. A buzzword (of course) even sprang up to describe this phenomenon: dismediation.

Few people stopped to consider how impractical this idea of dismediation actually was.

Viewing mediators as barriers is a narrow and ill-informed perspective. This idea vastly (vastly!!) underestimates the value of mediators in the creative realm--editors and publishers for written works, producers and recording companies for music. When mediators are doing their jobs well (and, admittedly, not all of them do), they perform the worthy service of separating the wheat from the chaff, at least preliminarily.

When it cost a lot of money to have a printing press, the owner of the press needed to be very impressed with a piece of writing to want to use his (or her; but it was always his back then, I'm afraid) resources to print it. When it essentially doesn't cost anything to publish something, we are clearly tempted to do away with that part of the process that would demand a sense of worthiness before publication. In doing so, we are looking at the problem as an economic one only, rather than understanding that at least sometimes the fact that financial resources were required to get the art "out there" did have the side benefit of requiring some objective assessment of whether the art was worthy of an audience in the first place.

Now then, this process gets complicated, of course, when culture moves to a place where that which is likely to return an investment is distinctly different from that which is good, that which has Quality. The mediation process is ever an inexact science, but I think the idea that the answer is "dismediation" is a naive and foolish response.

If you're not sure you agree with me, go ahead and check out an "upload free-for-all" and see how long it takes you to find some songs you enjoy.