Nick Carr and The Magic Of Mediation

[via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Google in the middle]

Nick Carr strays in his analysis of how Google is supposedly screwing the news business over:

[via Google in the middle]

Three truths:

1. Google is a middleman made of software. It’s a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That’s Google.

2. The middleman acts in the middleman’s interest.

3. The broader the span of the middleman’s control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman’s power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.

For much of the first decade of the Web’s existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine.

We were misinformed. The Web didn’t kill mediators. It made them stronger.

Um… but he never really talks about us, the web denizens, the ones doing the searches and clicking on links and writing posts.

This is not just a marketplace where the news industry is in a battle with Google. This is where we live. We have taken control away from the self-appointed arbiters of mediation — the old media machinery — and moved it into our hivemind. Half of that witchery is embodied by Google’s search and link magic, but the better half is our doing.

We are loaning this power to Google, and Google is mediating our choices, our worldview, our magic back on organized media, and the world of business, politics, and society. Google is doing our bidding.

And if it ceases to do so, that power will move.

Carr and others underestimate the power of the Edglings. We underestimate ourselves, too.