Education
Disintermediation is giving the user or the consumer direct access to information that otherwise would require a mediator, such as a librarian, a doctor, or a translator. Web-based technologies (e.g. search engines, machine translation systems) give users the power to access information that was previously accessible only to specialists. In some cases this might remove the need for the mediator (librarian, doctor, translator), but at the very least, it changes the relationship between the user and the product (e.g. text). For instance, the notions of terminologization and de-terminologization, where lexical items move from language for general purposes into language for specific purposes, or vice versa, are both susceptible to the effects of disintermediation. Another example is online searching using natural language keyword queries. Are users choosing appropriate search terms to identify specialized information, and how effective are the resulting searches? In this presentation, we will explore the social process of disintermediation in the language professions, focusing in particular on ways in which this phenomenon is affecting specialized professional and academic discourse.