Blogherald: a blog about blogs? Why, yes, thank you! I found the site a pretty interesting and useful read. It offers a nice, neat overview of how blogs are being used, who's making use of them, and what kind of impact they're having WITH context and specific stories. I enjoyed the snippet about the blogging nun. Also, remember me spouting about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in the first or second class? No? Okay, I'm not surprised, but you can learn more here about how to avoid doing it the wrong way (which'll give you an idea of how to do it the right way). Cool, right? Thanks Blogherald--you promoted my quasi-legitimacy by furnishing a helpful link.
The majority of the sites I've cruised that offer literature on blogging "ethics" prescribe conversation as being the cornerstone of a healthy individual blog or blog community. Blogs do, indeed, have to be conversations--but bloggers don't always know this at first. I suspect that often blogs start off apostrophic in nature (I, for instance, began my LiveJournal in the Spring of 2005 with a particular audience of one in mind. That audience then just happened to expand without my ever intending it to) or the blogger has no real hope of gaining a following (take the elderly female technophile's blog--you know, the one with the robodog?) ...but then something miraculous occurs: comments flow in. All of a sudden, the thing that always should've been a conversation but never necessarily was becomes one. Sometimes an uncomfortable one. From the moment that commenting begins, the blogger is powerfully reminded that he is no longer alone in his own personal cyber realm--he's forced to react to and interact with myriad other bloggers in his blogosphere. This means that he's got to censor himself more. This mean's he's got to be accountable. This is when tension arises as we've seen with Jason Scott and Coffee.
Those of us who posted acerbic comments about Jason nervously awaited his arrival in class, wondering if he were planning upon bringing a loaded magnum and a set of brass knuckles as dates. As Jim has pointed out, it's easy to forget--even WITH the immediacy of comments and having established that we do, in fact, have an audience and a responsibility to have a fair, transparent conversation--that there are other HUMANS in the mix here. One of our TrinBlogWarriors deleted her post after she came to this realization herself but, alas, due to Jason's wily cybertricks, it'll be preserved forever on however many mirror sits. With Coffee, too, we got into trouble. Or...erm...mainly I did. I whipped off a snap judgment as I'm wont to do--only I didn't make this snap judgment in the ear of a confidant or in my own head. It was in writing. It was part of the conversation. And Coffee talked back.
As far as protection goes, I don't think bloggers (or persons involved with bloggers) can expect it. As personal bloggers we're all more or less blogging in a manner dictated by our personal moral and ethical codes. The topics that get spewed out there into the vast blog conversation are dictated by our own preferences and whims. We can keep ourselves safe in our own blogs, free of personal detractions, but that doesn't mean our friend who also blogs will have any compunction about outing us. According to his moral and ethical blog code, making mention of something that might embarrass us is perfectly acceptable for sharing. This struggle ultimately boils down to the fact that perception, to a great degree, is reality and varies so greatly from person to person. What's acceptable blog-fodder for one blogger may not be for another. So, perception coloring this decision so vastly, regulation is impossible. To bring it into the real, this exact issue (personal versus private, and who has the right to share how much) cracked the final support column of the relationship of two of my close friends whom we'll call Ellen and Max.
Ellen is an incredibly private person. If you tell this girl a secret, it's more secure with her than it would be written in invisible ink in mirror script Kufi, then locked up in a Swiss bank's safe and guarded by a team of man-eating rock trolls. She's equally witholding with her own secrets so it's very, very hard to really know her. Max, on the other hand, is the man to whom I often refer as no-holds-barred-Max. Max will tell you anything and everything about his emotions, his thoughts, his needs, his problems, his personal life and the personal life of anybody else he knows. Dating Ellen, naturally, was a problem, because in being together they created a collective personal life. Max, used to sharing his own, was very much willing to discuss this collective personal life whilst Ellen...well...wasn't. Max argued, "Hey! It's my life. I decide which parts to omit and which to share." Ellen countered with, "It isn't just your life, Max. It's mine, too." Max protested, "It's ours, Ellen. Not yours." Ellen's final rebuttal was, "Well if it's ours then that means at least a portion of it is owned by me, and I prefer you not discuss our relationships with all of your friends." Max couldn't understand these restrictions on his expression. Ellen couldn't understand why, to him, the right to share as he pleases is sacred to him. Naturally, she dumped him.
Max never shared or discussed anything he did in a mean-spirited manner--his definitions of what was acceptable to share and who had ownership just differed vastly from those of Ellen. This little example is exactly the same as what happened with the Bloggers of the NYT Rosen article. Debbie, for example, believes it to be her Internet-given right to identify her bad dates while they'd prefer some anonymity. If a person truly believes he or she has every right to share what he sees fit, regardless of the desires of others, then isn't regulation impossible? Unfortunately, I kind of suspect it is, and I'm not sure whether this is a good or a bad thing, or whether it isn't that easily definable at all.
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