Online Review (8): Hypermediation

In this blogpost, I am highlighting the topic hypermediation with a link to capital gain over the Internet.

Web 2.0 has spiked hypermediation.

The main goal of media is to transfer experiences from one user to another, and due to the growing nature of intermediated tools – blogs, news aggregrators, community platforms, and more – this has now become easier than ever (Bolter & Grusin. 2000).

It is no longer the company who sells directly to consumers it is the middlemen who gain momentum. In fact, they are the ones that walk away with the money (Carr. 2010).

Sites such as eBay, Google, Yahoo play intermediary roles (Carr 2010). Online affiliate programs and intermediated media tools enable lay people to skim off money from companies by referring. They direct site visitors that are interested in a particular topic, item or thing to the purchasing site of the owner/seller, mostly using computer-mediated tools such as blogs, forums, and community platforms. The amount of traffic on sites, and the efficiency in which site visitors roam web sites and make transactions enables hypermediation to flourish. E-marketplaces are media as much for social interactions as they are for financial transactions. That is, who you are and what you are doing are as important as what you want to buy or what you want to sell. Your reputation on eBay is far more important than what you are attempting to either buy or sell (Rheingold 2002).

I found that the increasing power of e-marketplaces and affiliates will continue to flourish over the years, and thus enables intermediaries to gain a living by using the Internet. Furthermore, the virtual exposure of those selling and buying is becoming increasingly important when they aim to expand their online capital gain.



References:

Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge: MIT Press

Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: Random House Inc.

Howard Rheingold (2002). Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. London: Perseus Publishing, 2002