Saturday, August 30, 2008

Today’s Word Is - Apomediation

Many years ago we worked for a Supply Chain Director in a major retail operation who started his departmental meetings collecting words. Each team member opened with a new word and he tried to guess its meaning. The routine took only a few minutes but often was enlightening or just fun.

Yesterday Joe Esposito pointed out a new word from The Scholarly Kitchen blog on "apomediation," an alternative to mediation and disintermediation.Apomediation came from a paper by Gunther Eysenbach in the Journal of Internet Medical Research.

We are familiar with intermediation, mediation between one person and another, or between one person or entity and a resource. Intermediaries often exist because there is a scarcity model at work.

Apomediation is created by introducing the Latin term for “separate, detached, away from.” It is the mediation experienced when you read user reviews, or when people who have no stake in the ultimate decision or access to the service, resource, or information can influence your action.
As access to more resource and information grows does this new form of mediation start to replace intermediation as we knew it or are we merely wordsmithing?

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