Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
This also irks me, but in reverse. The assumption is that the majority of paid-for content is actually good, wherein in fact its mostly mass-marketed, focus-grouped, carbon-copied pablum. Out of all the BBC produced TV shows this year there was only a tiny fraction of that content that could be labelled as 'good', and as usual we got a vast majority of gameshows, reality based humiliation festivals and soap operas.
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Good points all, and eloquently made. However, that assumption is not mine - paid content does not guarantee quality, but it does broaden what is possible.
You mention the responsibility of deciding what is good and what is bad. Sadly the talent to do so is rare, and the ability to deliver rarely lies with one person. Whilst publishing infrastructure can be a poor bedfellow of changing technology, it's role in polishing creative works into gems does benefit us, even if much of the time the items it is polishing are less worthy.
I'd be happier with the headlong rush to democratic distribution of media (shit or otherwise), if someone could come up with a useful way to support talent scouts, editors, proofreaders, typesetters and their other media equivalents as much as the authors that benefit from them. Anderson's explanation of how authors might be supported by free media is somewhat tenuous, so what place these others have in the new media model I don't know.