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Pastimes : Investment Chat Board Lawsuits -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CYBERKEN who wrote (1422)	4/30/2001 10:07:58 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Respond to of 12465

Ken, what it boils down to is the difference between writing and publishing. I know when I first started writing messages on the Internet (which began right here on SI), I thought it was like glorified e-mail. It wasn't until about six months later, when I attended a Y2K conference featuring a stock I had vocally supported on SI and all sorts of people who I had never had any contact with and who had never posted on SI came over to thank me for keeping them informed, that I realized my words were reaching an unseen audience and influencing them. To them, I was more like a reporter than just some guy posting in his underwear at odd hours of the night. I guess people figured if someone took the time to put something in writing it must be true. As I'm sure you know, many people have made small fortunes exploiting this strange aspect of human trust. The good thing about the Internet is that it doesn't play favorites. Anyone can literally "publish" their ideas. There's a great quote in the current edition of Time Magazine by Stephen Barrett in an article entitled "The Man Who Loves to Bust Quacks": "Twenty years ago, I had trouble getting my ideas through to the media... Today I am the media ( quackwatch.com )." I view scales not as linear but as circular; on a fully developed scale the far right and far left converge. We used to be a country that depended on the mails, i.e. the written word, to communicate. With the immediacy -- and scope -- of the Internet, we seem to be returning to those days. People are still adjusting to this. People are still learning how to sort through the morass. While the CEO of a company might know a post on a chat board was just someone's idea of a tasteless joke, or even perhaps the absolute truth, he might sue for defamation simply because he knows the impact it might have on others and hence the perceived value of his company. The current spate of court decisions in favor of defendants in defamation suits, both due to privacy concerns and the merits of the cases themselves, to me, signals the beginnings of maturity in the Internet Age. We have started down the path of enlightenment where people begin to realize and accept that the Internet is merely a reflection of society as a whole and should be treated accordingly. And just like we've all developed ways to evaluate people we meet at work, at parties, or on the streets, we'll all develop ways to evaluate what we read on-line. And, more importantly, we all won't get so bent out of shape over things we know to be misleading or untrue, over which in the past we might have sued, because we'll know most others will have become more discerning as well. - Jeff