I snagged this from another site, thought it was humorous.
Message 11859137
>>>>>November 3, 1999
Where's Alan?
Britney Spears needn't worry about Alan Greenspan eclipsing her presence on the Net. A search for Greenspan sites turned up next to nothing about the Fed chairman.
By David Futrelle
Alan Greenspan has learned to love the Internet. Sure, he was skeptical of all those New Economy fairy tales at first, but in recent months his disquisition on the wonders of technology have come to sound, in their oblique, Fed-chairmanesque way, almost exuberant. (Sure, he's a little more measured in his rhetoric than, say, the editors of Wired magazine--in a recent speech to the Business Council in Boca Raton he would only go so far as to say that "the Internet offers an admixture of potential new goods and services and potential lower costs of production." But long-time Fed-ologists understand that this is just Greenspan-speak for "the Net is gonna rock your world!"
You might imagine that Greenspan's new love of the Net would be reciprocated--that the vast digital wasteland of the web would be filled with shrines to this curmudgeonly financial avatar. The business media, after all, treats the Fed chairman as a sort of financial deity--the god of interest rates--who must be appeased if the economy and the markets are to continue hop-hop-hopping along.
But there's scant evidence online that Alan Greenspan even exists. Indeed, it's easier to find information on Alan Hale (the late actor most famous for his portrayal of the Skipper on Gilligan's Island) than it is to find information on Alan Greenspan (for better or worse, the single most influential figure in the world economy today).
On the bustling financial message boards, Greenspan seems less an obsession than an annoyance; most of the discussion is decidedly less-than-reverential. On the Silicon Investor message boards, where Greenspan receives more attention than anywhere else, the Fed chair is getting it from both sides, having inspired antagonistic and contradictory threads devoted to castigating him, on the one hand, for his occasional attempts to reign in speculative stock market excess, the other having inspired much of this excess in the first place with his "irresponsible" policies of "easy money." But most Silicon Investors seem less interested in chatting about the Chairman than they do in debating the merits and demerits of more colorful Net Investment icons like TheStreet.Com's Jim Cramer--who has inspired many times the number of posts as Greenspan.
Over on the wilder and woollier Yahoo message boards, most of the Greenspan-related discussion isn't centered around the Fed chairman himself, but on various trash-talking impostors who've taken his name as theirs. And on the anarchistic conglomeration of "newsgroups" known collectively as Usenet, the most interesting Greenspan-related conversation isn't taking place in misc.invest.stocks but inside the confines of alt.anagrams, where the phrase "Economist Alan Greenspan" has been transformed into such anagramistic wonders "a top senile con man angers."
At a time when even second-string celebrities can inspire fan sites by the truckload, Greenspan has inspired all of one--a strangely Spartan site known as GetExuberant.com, which offers a few basic facts about the Fed boss alongside a couple of short essays on the glories of Ayn Randian greed. But the site, put online by David Gallivan, a business major at Adams State College in Colorado, seems to have slaked a certain hunger among Alan's fans: GetExuberant.com's guestbook is filled with dozens of grateful messages, including one rhythmically challenged poetic tribute to the Fed chair ("Without him we'd be in debts to our head/With him we feel safe before we go to bed") and a request for a Greenspan t-shirt. Gallivan, for his part, is puzzled by the net's lack of interest in his hero. "We have a person who has been instrumental in creating the prosperity we're currently experiencing in America and no one else has decided to set up a fan page," he complains. "People will set up pages to worship the most obscure celebrities and no one will make the effort to honor someone who has done so much."
Actually, one other person has--though his sort of tribute might not pass muster with true Greenspanmaniacs. The Silly "Alan Greenspan" Putty page allows visitors to stretch and bend the face of the Fed chair, silly-putty style, with the help of a handy Java applet. As someone who's not much of a fan of the Fed (or of many of his online critics, for that matter), I find this tribute the most satisfying of all.
"I thought it would be fun for people to use the image morphing applet to put some emotion on such a somber face," explains the site's creator, Michael Holman, who heads up the web projects of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis, Missouri. Holman, who thinks the Fed chair is doing a fine job, says he's gotten no response whatsoever to the page so far--and when I contacted him said he'd sort of forgotten it was even online.
It's hard, he says, for most web users to get terribly excited about Greenspan. "I don't think a lot of people know what Greenspan actually does," he writes me. "Now if Greenspan began wearing a Trek uniform at rank of captain... Then you'd see the fan sites come online."
Alan, are you listening? <<<<<< |
