Mimi Ito has updated her “Media Mixes” paper for inclusion in an upcoming book entitled Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (which doesn’t have much web presence yet, but sounds right on). Anyway, it’s well worth checking out if you want to understand what the pervasive media ecology of the future (and for kids, the present) looks like. (Here’s hoping Dr. L. Ron Reacharoundasaurus will drop some science on us in the comments regarding whether she has her facts straight on the card gaming culture.)

I think she’s a little too easy on the corporations currently engineering the media mix; it’s pretty clear they could care less about empowering people and are all about the cold, hard cash. And let’s face it, they’re doing their best to keep this kind of thing illegal and marginal. But part of what we need to do is convince the media corporations that by loosening their grip and allowing peer-to-peer cultural production to move from the margins to the mainstream, they can solve some currently intractable problems. If we fail, we need to burn the whole thing down and start over.

Unmediated? Nope. It’s just that anyone can become a mediator, now. Today two stories juxtaposed themselves just so in my newsreader. First a Wired piece on a California schoolteacher’s homemade iPod ad:

“There’s a real trend toward consumer-generated media. People are creating news, they’re blogging. People will create marketing as well.”

Then Lucas Gonze on the perils of selling out:

Now that I’ve been doing this a few weeks I strongly agree that paying people to talk about you is a good idea. The tricky part is being a paid talker, because the money breaks the conversational flow and makes it hard to not be creepy or annoying.

The near future will bring all sorts of new social etiquette questions. “How much advertising should I splice into my wedding video?”

As of 8:42 this morning, the top headline on Google News was a blog. That’s a first as far as I know.

The algorithms have spoken, and the most relevant source of news on the 2004 Presidental debate isn’t a “news organization,” it’s a guy with a brain and a text editor. Looks like Dave Winer might win his bet.

Kenyatta believes that the democratization of media will result in better content. I myself am less optimistic. Case in point: the “Most Popular Photos” page on Yahoo! News. Yahoo! keeps records of how often its news photos are emailed to others, and collects the most popular photos of the day there. This is photojournalism as selected and edited by your peers, freed from the shackles of Big Media. And this is how they’ve chosen to cover (or uncover) the Olympic Games. Now you might object that traditional photojournalists took these pictures, that Big Media is still behind the curtains, pandering to the masses. Fair enough, but keep in mind what one of the first applications of moblogging was. Don’t expect disintermediation to raise the level of discourse. What it will do is increase the sheer amount of stuff out there, so along with more ass, we’ll have more weird stuff, more edgy stuff, more brave stuff, more really really good stuff. It’ll be the long tail at the end of the power law curve in terms of audience, but it will be there, if we can find it.