How many people are capable of producing good text, good still images, good moving pictures, good music, and all the other ingredients of a high-quality multimedia experience entirely on their own?

For that matter, how many teams could do it?  Just the logistical difficulties of forming such a team would be formidable.

It makes much more sense for material to be available on a “plug and play” basis.  We need a way for each individual producer of multimedia content to find and splice in a piece of this from Source A, a section of that from Source B, and a smidgen of something else from Source C—all on the fly, without ever knowing either A, B, or C.

Fortunately, this can be accomplished using essentially the same techniques discussed for building collaborative writing “from parts” in earlier sections of this essay.