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The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?

March 22, 2015

The Web: Destroyer or Savior of Culture, Pay and Employment?

The cost of creating and distributing content has fallen to near-zero, and that is not going away.

Last month I explored the contentious question, Is the Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? In my recent video discussion with analyst Gordon T. Long, we expanded this question to pay (earned income) and jobs, i.e. is the Web eroding pay and jobs?

I also discussed these issues with Mike Swanson of Wall Street Window in a podcast Is The Web Destroying the Cultural Economy? An historian by training, Mike is well-placed to put these issues in a larger context.

 

There are several key dynamics at work.One is the democratization of expression and journalism unleashed by the Web has eroded the industrial meritocracy of gatekeepers and vertically integrated content-media corporations: music labels, publishers, newspapers, etc.

The web has enabled virtually anyone with Internet access to create a nearly-free global distribution network–what I have termed 800 Million Channels of Me (February 21, 2011). This blog is obviously one of those millions of globally distributed channels.

Critics of this democratization feel that this has unleashed an avalanche of mediocrity that is judged on “likes” and pages views–a process in which talent is “lost in a sea of garbage.”

The other side of the debate sees the demise of the gatekeepers, who could enforce their own view of what was valuable culturally and economically, as freeing all those who could never get past the gatekeepers. This explosion of creativity and expression is an unalloyed good thing.

 

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