Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do”: Democratization and Diversification + Shift of Control from Intermediaries
[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” written for a symposium called “Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I’d serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
The new technologies I outlined above will, I believe, both democratize the information marketplace—make it more accessible to comparatively poor speakers as well as rich ones—and diversify it. Of course, the power to make one’s speech globally available isn’t the power to make it globally heard. One still has to get people to listen, through advertising, word of mouth, good reviews, or other devices. Advertising will still cost money, and well-funded bands or columnists or newsletters will still attract more readers than poorer ones will.
Nonetheless, while advertising is obviously useful, it’s not strictly necessary; many products are sold today largely through word of mouth or reviews (especially when one considers radio as the reviewing medium that it is). Wealth will certainly remain relevant in the new information structure, but it will be a good deal less relevant than it is today.
Likewise, a greater diversity of available speech need not lead to diversification of what is actually consumed. It’s possible that even after the coming of the infobahn, most people will still consume largely what they do today. But at least those people whose tastes differ from the majority’s will be served. They might, of course, continue to complain about the majority’s bad taste; but that’s something no technology can do much about.
[And t]he trends I’ve described have one thing in common: They tend to shift control from intermediaries—record labels, radio and TV station owners, newspaper, magazine, and book publishers—to speakers and listeners. The relatively low cost of electronic distribution gives speakers more control over what is said: A speaker need no longer satisfy the intermediaries before being allowed to speak. The relatively low cost of personalized electronic distribution gives m
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