Marsden is Here

It's exactly the two-way nature of the internet which results in the direct connection between content creator and content consumer, but that's still the relationship. We consume news (replacing newspapers, radio, TV) information (replacing encyclopedias, print journals), entertainment (replacing books, newspapers, radio and TV again). Someone has to write this stuff.

We even (most of us) 'watch' the content through images on a screen.

The internet in this context can be seen as an amalgam of content providers. So can a TV network, but the internet doesn't have a programme manager picking and choosing what we get to see in a particular time slot from the available content.

There is still an infrastructure we pay to access - with a TV station it's the broadcasting network ('paid' via advertising, govt funding). With the internet - well, accurately, with the world wide web it's the internet (paid with $$ to the ISPs).

I guess my point is that from our end the experience is similar - information comes to us. We're so used to the business that we pay for our newspaper or that collects money from the advertising on TV then paying for the content that we forget (or never realise) that those transactions at the other end of the pipeline exist. So when we get to the internet we pay our money to the ISP, soak up the content and at a subconscious level assume whoever made the content is getting paid somehow.