What Are We Doing On-line? A Debate on the Social Consequences of Online Communications
One of the advantages of the net is that everybody can publish: it’s a free medium. There’s something very appealing and attractive about that. You can cut out the middleman – the publisher and the agent and everybody else. But when you open the floodgates entirely, you don’t get egalitarianism. You get babble. My shopping list becomes as valuable as Cormac McCarthy’s latest book. And then you go back to thinking, “Well, wait a minute, maybe those middlemen had some function, however flawed they were.”