The Disintermediation of the Peanut Gallery
At first I was going to write a simple substantive reply -- Mr. Gladstone is pointing out that Cramer made a mistake three years ago (yawn, who cares). Then Mr. Gladstone tacked on a gratuitous unsubstantiated criminal accusation. Perhaps he will lose his account here; perhaps he will get served with a civil suit; perhaps he will puke up a backhanded apology.
But to me, the interesting part is not the particulars of this case. Rather it's interesting for the illumination it sheds on the nature of communication in general and Internet communication in particular.
Let's suppose, instead of www.techstocks.com, Silicon Investor was a call-in radio program. And that on a given night, the host specified that the topic would be James J. Cramer and TheStreet.com.
There would be a ton of callers, positive and negative. If someone called up and wanted to denigrate Cramer for making a wrong call on IBM in 1996 (!), or buying Cendant after the fraud news earlier this year, or capitulating at the bottom in October 1998, whatever, I'm sure they'd get on the air. And they would stay on the air as long as they had something interesting to say with some facts and logic to back it up.
But if they wandered off into bizarre diatribes or wacko smears ("I don't like his style, so he must be a criminal!"), the host would cut them off and get on to the next caller.
That's the problem with this topic. Silicon Investor has enabled a public forum similar to a talk radio program, but it has *disintermediated the host*. And then the rock creatures come out.
The Internet supports both moderated (mediated) and unmoderated communication. I think Gresham's Law will govern the evolution of unmoderated communication: puerile discourse will drive out thoughtful discourse. It happened to Usenet. I've heard that it's also happened to CB Radio.
For that matter, it's happening to the Web. When I search for something, I use Yahoo. Yahoo has a layer of people who maintain its index files. Human beings at Yahoo mediate the Web that I see. I no longer want to see millions of low-quality hits from an unmediated service such as Alta Vista.
So I'm in favor of the reversal of disintermediation. I would welcome someone to edit my incoming message flow before I saw it, who would discard articles from the rock creatures of the world.
In an age of abundant information and scarce attention, I think this will be a popular position. I think in two more years, the proportion of moderated information on the Internet will go from "most" to "nearly all".
And in that world, if Mr. Gladstone wants to get my attention, he'll have to write a more interesting article. |
