Disintermediation

Disintermediation describes the removal of intermediaries—people or companies we commonly refer to as “middlemen.” When disintermediation occurs, consumers deal directly with manufacturers, audiences are in direct contact with authors or artists, and citizens hear directly from people who have something to say. The retail outlet, the publishing company or record label, and the news media no longer come between providers and consumers of ideas, goods, or services.

When best-selling author Stephen King made his short story Riding the Bullet available exclusively online, that was disintermediation. If we wanted to read the story, we went right to King's website, rather than to any other source such as a magazine or bookstore. King estimated he'd earn $450,000 for those 66 pages of fiction, rather than the $10,000 he'd probably have been paid if he'd published the story in a magazine.

The music-sharing system Napster, which created such an uproar in the recording industry that the Recording Industry Association of America sued its creator, is another example of disintermediation. Napster is a file transfer system that allows users to swap songs that have been encoded into the MP3 format. Developed by college student Shawn Fanning, Napster gave rise to a new type of application—peerto-peer software—that allows individual computer users to exchange files among themselves. Now that the courts have spoken, the prospects for the revolutionary application are uncertain. Still, Napster has had such an impact on our popular culture that our vocabulary now includes the word Napsterize, which means, essentially, to disintermediate.

Because disintermediation means that people who have information and ideas make the material available for us to access at our convenience, we can be more certain that we're getting what people actually wanted to give us—that material hasn't been screened, evaluated, or censored by editors or other so-called gatekeepers. Gatekeepers are intermediaries who determine what will or will not be disseminated via the mass media. They influence almost every medium—what films will be produced, what bands will get contracts and what songs they'll record, what authors will be allowed to publish what books, what television shows will be programmed and when they'll be scheduled, and even what news stories will be covered and in how much detail.

The Internet has begun to reduce the power of gatekeepers. If The New York Times, for example, doesn't want to write a story about a certain product that an activist group thinks is harmful, people in that group can simply prepare information about the product and post it on the Web. Disintermediation means that gatekeepers have not come between us and the people with something to say.

There are positive and negative aspects to the process of disintermediation. A democracy is stronger when a wide variety of ideas and viewpoints—even those that challenge the status quo—are considered and debated. But with no gatekeepers, how can we know that the information we obtain online is accurate? Most people feel fairly confident that the journalistic integrity and standards of media outlets such as The New York Times result in the publication of the truth. But when we search the Web more broadly, exactly who is providing the content? It could be literally anyone with a computer and Internet access. What are the content providers' qualifications, biases, and backgrounds? Often, we do not know. Consumers must always be critical of information obtained online; just because something has been posted on the Web doesn't mean that it is true.

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