...but a conversation with a friend on IM made me realize... well, made me solidify a realization I had ages back, regarding what the internet is truly accomplishing.
Unlike all the ads claiming it on the radio and what-not, the internet is truly removing the middle-man from artistic endeavors. More than anything else, it's proving that Information wants to be free! is missing one very important seven-letter word. Flowing. Information wants to be free flowing! is vastly more accurate, I believe. Middle-men, steps between final creation and final consumption of a product, are obstacles to that free flow.
Removing those middle-men and allowing for things like hundreds of fans to pay an artist to continue a small work, up to hundreds of thousands of artists getting a studio to continue producing a beloved series, are both examples of what the internet is allowing for today. The free flow of information. Not without cost, but without obstacles of time or distance.2 commentsLeave a comment
I don't think we're getting rid of middlemen. However, the middlemen are getting better.
Look at, for example, YouTube. It is, effectively, a middleman, because it can enforce the law and has some standards (when they get around to enforcing them). But really, how many people that have become famous or respected for their YouTube videos would have never tried before without YouTube making it so easy?
We need more middlemen like that, I think. I think XNA wants to be the indie gamer's YouTube; MySpace, before it became LiveJournal for the colorblind, was trying to be the indie musician's YouTube.
Not to mention 'middlemen' like SPR, which allowed us to meet. ^_^
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SPR, YouTube, those are both obvious examples of services. Free, but still services provided. The former, a dedicated textual chat interface with Interaction Fiction aspects integrated in. The latter, a unified playback and upload interface that handles all the legal aspects instead of having each individual deal with them.
The 'middleman' I'm referring to are closer to car-salesman, or for an even more obvious example a lot of import stores, that are no longer able to charge massive markups compared to their costs because someone else can go right to the manufacturer and buy the same thing much more cheaply, in effect capitalism in action giving a massive push away from the massive multi-step sales progressions of the past. Even comics, one of the longest-standing bastions of five or more 'middlemen' handling an order, has had huge progress towards direct-sale stuff with the affordable and decent-quality short-run-printing machines that are available these days.
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