What Is A Blog?
Since this topic, what is a blog, and what it means to be anonymous, and where do journalistic standards come in, has been getting some pixelspace lately on LiL, I found Ryan’s commentary over at Below Boston, “Some Serious Netroots Reform,” particularly apt and timely.
First, Ryan outlines a similar idea that I have:
But in Ritchie’s case, as I suggested in the diary, his only serious mistake was to confuse blogging with commenting. Unfortunately, it’s an all-too common situation.
As someone with some experience in local campaigns, I hear time and time again people talking about comments on WickedLocal and other community papers as “the blogs.” It’s a dangerous precedent that must be kept in check, immediately.
It’s easy to see where the confusion grows: most of the population’s never been to a blog; people just think any online commentary is simply ‘blogging.’ It would be nice if we could chalk this up to one big confusion, but by allowing this misunderstanding to take place, the reputation of blogs as useful tools is being sullied, all the while the real culprits are free from actually fixing the problem.
Follow me after the break, it’s a long post…
Though Ryan is using newspaper online comment sections as his whipping boy, (”we can’t cure the problem of unaccountable commenters at newspapers if the population at large thinks it’s ‘the blogs.’ While people are calling for a fix in ‘the blogs,’ newspapers have no real incentive to fix it, because they aren’t ‘the blogs’”), it’s still a relevant course of thought in regards to any blog.
I’ll cite one example of a local politician (won’t name names as it’s irrelevant) who cornered one of us once, taking exception to something that was said in one comment one time, blaming the front-pager (who wasn’t even the owner of the blog, ie, not me) as though they themselves made the comment. It was pretty absurd on the face of it, but understandable.
One of the problems in Lowell, besides the fact that some have not the technical or internet background to readily understand the online world (and hey, it’s a generational thing) is that in this town, someone tells someone who tells the subject of the comment that something somewhere was said about them (and of course usually getting it wrong). Accountability is nearly impossible even in the best of circumstances when one is playing political Telephone (where the message is garbled by repeating from person to person). The person at the end of the line never read, saw, or heard the thing being talked about, whether it originated on radio or in a newspaper or online, but the subject or their proxies go and acts like they themselves viewed/heard it with their own eyes/ears. It’s a fascinating study into the human rumor mill.
But beyond that, commenting is not, in essence, really “blogging.” Commenters do not have their own blog by coming here to comment. They are participating in someone else’s blog, to one extent or other, a laudable activity (we couldn’t live without you guys) but they only own their own comments. The accountability either comes from other commenters, the reputation they’ve garnered over time, or even sometimes, through comment moderation by the blog’s moderators.
When running a blog, you have a couple of choices to make. You can shut comments off, which changes your site from a blog, into a editorial site, really. You can open things up completely, which does tend to result in spam (like email) and people who run at the mouth incessantly. Or you can moderate comments (or require registration, which if we upgrade LiL we will be doing). Within the last choice, you have to decide just how much to “censor” people, anonymous or not. (I suppose a choice could be that you require people to use their real names, but that’s about as chilling as censoring people in my mind.)
We’ve banned a few people. One of my standards for deciding to do this is when I start to feel I don’t want to visit my own blog. As a benevolent dictator - and I’ve never pretended to be anything else - personal assaults on my enjoyment of this website, which I own wholly, are the mark of death to a person’s comments. So for instance we have our libertarian or conservative commenters, whose comments are passed through despite the fact I think they’re nuts (sorry, guys!) while some other few (whatever their political stripe) are instantly censored.
We also have made it known we don’t really like personal attacks on politicians or others. Attacks on policy or their role as elected officials or businessmen or public employees, on the other hand, are readily permitted. To some, that has been offensive (and frankly, I might get defensive too if it were me). However, in going back and examining the comment threads obliquely referred to in the latest discussion, I can say that honestly, people were not personally attacking, but rather citing known facts, and expressing disgust at previous public behavior. Here’s the first real example of one of these discussions, and here’s another one.
What is great about that last thread is that the discussion was joined by the subject (Jim), who could give us his own perspective. In a long comment, he talked about what he was doing to turn around a family’s reputation which, many in Lowell believe, has been well deserved. I not only applaud him for addressing concerns, but for being a part of the conversation. I think it takes bravery to confront your critics (I should know, I hate doing it) and put yourself out there. (Another such instance of a conversation is here.)
Ryan explores some of the problems of blogging, and proposes some solutions:
What are the problems?
* Anonymity.
* Unaccountability.
* A general ignorance about the web 2.0.What are the solutions?
* Solving anonymity: the universal acceptance of ’signing in.’
* Solving the accountability gap: the universal promotion of online meritocracy; making newspapers buy into the importance of building user-name reputation.
* Solving Web ignorance: education. Everyone should know what a blog is versus a comment versus a forum.
There is power in blogs for us as citizens…that you don’t have to leave it up to others to create a storyline, to make suppositions, but can, by the strength of your own reasoning, put another story, your story, out there. It’s what the mainstream (especially TV) media still hasn’t figured out - that the frustration with their lazy, on-the-cheap pick-a-storyline-and-go-with-it reporting (Iraq war, anyone?) is what makes blogs so powerful. We blogs, in our decentralized, messy, conversationalist way try to get at the story behind the story. Whether that’s because a credible front pager writes a good post, or because in comments the more persuasive and factual argument wins the day, it little matters. Everyone is afforded the equal opportunity to go at it.
However, this process requires a lot more personal investment on the part of the community. It’s not a passive activity like watching TV, or reading a newspaper. It’s an active, driven, and yes, sometimes frustrating medium. But like democracy, that other messy conversation, it’s a struggle worth having.
Ryan concludes,
Bloggers, commenters and internet-savvy people need to become involved; we need to recognize there’s a real problem here - and take ownership of it. We can’t be so naive as to think that anything on the Internet is a good thing, because the bad elements threaten to ruin the potential of what we can truly accomplish.
If the vast majority of the population doesn’t value the medium of blogging, it’s only going to be that much harder to gain traction and sustain progress. Everyone needs to know the difference between a blog, an Internet forum and comments - whether people use them or not. That’s the only way to make sure the media holds local papers accountable when their comment sections run amok. Newspapers make accountability in letters and opinions paramount; online comments shouldn’t be any different. In both cases people are using the brand of a newspaper to give their opinions greater weight, so newspapers should have an interest in stake here. Most importantly, when it comes to being online, while being anonymous can be a good thing, being unaccountable is never acceptable. The progressive blogosphere is built around that premise, but we can’t rest until it’s a universal standard all across the Internet.
Now, let’s have that conversation. 
