MyIrony.com

Blogging, ethics, and moolah

Chutney reflects on how the increasing corporate presence in the blogsphere (Raging Cow, anyone?) has begun a dialog among webloggers on the meaning of the practice.

Make that the ethics of the practice: The Happy Tutor, Tom Coates and Rebecca Blood all propose guidelines that would contravene the commodification of weblogs. Chutney pays special attentions to the proposals of Ms. Blood: "Drawing heavily on journalistic ethics, Rebecca argues for full disclosure of conflicts of interest and questionable sources. All well and good."

It's her fourth item that makes me uncomfortable: "Write each entry as if it could not be changed: add to, but do not rewrite, delete, any entry." Rules of thumb are helpful as just that: rules of thumb. Otherwise, you are venturing into the realm of deonotological, or duty-based, ethics. The problem with deontology is that it's too rigid to survive in the real world, where things have a nasty habit of not doing as they're told. Weblogs--by definition--constantly change. Why should individual entries be any different? The case needs to be made.

The comments thread zeroes down on this particular detail: To rewrite or not. Not being able to grasp the need for ethics long enough, this is what my 2¢ end up looking like...

I'm on a chatty mood today. I'll write about my methods for revising old entries: I'll fix typos, misspellings and grammatical errors until the entry is as polished as a brass knob. If I change a whole sentence I document the change. I do that mostly for people who might have read the entry before and now detect some kind of disagreement between their recollection of it and what's in front of their eyes. Also, because I might have changed the whole meaning of the entry with that simple act. If I have to make a correction, I'll leave my original text (strikeout is verbotten not allowed at my weblog) and just add the correction at the end. I'll add an update to an entry if the update works to bring closure to the item, not to keep bullding up on it; otherwise, it's material for a whole new entry.

A happy surprise: Ms. Blood herself decides to chime in on the conversation, and considers my "method of revision is completely in the spirit of my proposed guidelines—as described, the reader has all the information they might need, and the integrity of the network is completely protected."

Wow. And I haven't even had a chance to look at all of her guidelines.

one point which I would like to clarify: my proposed ethics are not intended to "make weblogs more journalism-like". in fact, in my book I argue at length that weblogs are not a new form of journalism, and shouldn't even aspire to be so--I think we're stronger (and important and interesting) as something different, and trying to fit us into a pre-existing mold, to my mind, misses the point. for that reason, in thinking about ethics for weblogging, I discarded the journalistic standard of accuracy and fairness. that's unrealistic, and not really in the spirit of what we're doing. the standard I arrived at was transparency, and I derived each of guideline from that principle. Posted by: rebecca blood on March 13, 2003 05:30 PM