DISQUS

Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago

The fallacy is the vision of the quasi-commune. I keep asking, what's so great about being an unpaid stringer? What's so superultrafantastic that you can be a freelancer for no money (or Google Ads pennies)?

What happens is that a gatekeeping structure develops where there's a few voices heard, and everyone else. Yes, it's possible for someone to be in the right place at the right time and get a big break in terms of attention that way - I heard it, I don't need that repeated. But so what?

Again, a big problem is an almost pathlogical denial of a gatekeeping system, in the fact of manifest evidence from the Power Law in the abstract, to the practice that the same Big Heads in the bogosphere get attention for saying the same things over and over.

[anti-snark - I've said all this before too, that's my cross to bear]

Mathew Ingram · 3 years ago

Thanks for the comment, Seth. Although I think we may disagree on how much there is, I would agree that gatekeeping occurs -- see the post right after this one about Edelman and Wal-Mart and the lack of coverage it has gotten in the A-list. That's human nature, to some extent.