Apr 10, 2007
My friend Noah Brier, an avid blogger, awesome networker, and great idea man recently blogged about Tim O'Reilly's suggested Code of Conduct for bloggers. I was inspired to leave a comment, which I did... and I've posted it here for future reference (in case I offended Noah, and he subscribes to O'Reilly's suggestion...) ;-)
Noah, you're dead on with being concerned about point #2, "We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person" (and the whole concept of a code of conduct). Imagine if the internet existed when there was slavery... would we want to silence Southerners who favored a ban on slavery - just because they likely wouldn't/couldn't say it in person? Their words would certainly be inflammatory and considered offensive by the majority of Southerners (hence the Civil War). Should that kind of discourse be muted? Who determines what is offensive? Remember last summer's riots in Muslim communities because of a cartoon containing the Prophet Muhammad? In the West we were baffled by this reaction.
And suggesting that you can't anonymize (sp?) something is ridiculous. Consider that The New York Times uses "anonymous sources" every day. How else could the Valery Plame incident have been brought to light? Remember how hard the NYTimes fought to maintain their right to keeping their sources anonymous? Why would bloggers so readily accept a code of conduct that their competition, the established media, would never consider?
Any form of attempted censorship (that dirty word O'Reilly chose to omit) shouldn't be tolerated by anyone. It's a reactionary response to a problem open societies will always confront. Noah, you said it best - you can't have it both ways.
Labels: blog, content, Philosophy, Rights
Stumble
Leave your response