The era when a small set of professionals controlled media creation is over. Anyone can now say anything to anyone. Make no mistake- the web is the biggest media revolution since the printing press.
Media companies have previously been anointers of the talented, by virtue of the production bottleneck. In a world of abundant producers, talent will continue to be scarce, but the talented will not lack for ways to display their work. This makes the market for talent a more ad hoc affair, less about artificial scarcity and more about mutual opportunity.
Even more dramatically, users who have one good thing in them - one recipe, one video, one political rant - can now produce that one thing and be heard by millions, without needing a contract and without securing any long-term audience. The 15th-century rationale came, at base, from the economic risk of spending time and effort producing bad material. Those economic limitations are gone; the question every amateur creator asks themselves every day isn’t “Why publish this?” but “Why not?”
This shift means we are in the middle of the greatest increase in expressive capability in human history: more people can communicate more things to more people than at any time. It’s possible to lament a media culture with this many new participants - average quality falls, august businesses are destroyed - but this also happened with the spread of printing. The question isn’t whether we want a medium that lets everyone produce content; we’ve got it. The question now is how we use it.
