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| Thursday, November 15, 2001 |
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Backtaking 
| | Mike also (perhaps in response to what I just wrote, below, in response to what he wrote here) asks a bunch of questions, which I'll respond to as if by email: |
| | Is there any responsibility in blogging? I think there is and I hope Doc agrees. |
| | I never liked that term, "responsibility." It is often used as a slightly more moral synonym for "accountability," which roughly means you pay for things you do wrong. Much of morality, if you look at the language we use to express it, is about accounting — paying for mistakes, repaying debts, etc. Often "responsibility" is an expression of control or reproach, as when parents tell their teenagers to "drive responsibly." |
| | A better term is care. Being responsible implies punishment for mistakes. Being careful doesn't. And yes, I think we should be careful. |
| | Can we say anything? We can, but the question is should we? |
| | My mother used to say she was "biting her tongue at the tonsils" to keep from saying something she shouldn't. |
| | What I like about blogs is that it's a lot easier to take back what you say than it is in more permanent media. I've yanked stuff down countless times. I know plenty of others who have as well. At least twice this week I've received emails from people that were cut from their blogs and sent personally because they either weren't comfortable posting the pieces or felt more comfortable speaking through email. |
| | Is this "responsible?" I dunno. Maybe not. But it's certainly careful. Even courteous. |
| | Is there a difference between sharing a thought with a neighbor and sharing a thought with thousands of others? I think so. |
| | Sure. There is also a difference between sharing something with thousands of others by blog and by newspaper. Anybody who reads this can contact me about it, immediately. And I have a choice about what I say next, or if I want to change what I've already said. No way with traditional publishing of any kind. |
| | Can doing things fast without the checks and balances of an editorial staff cause problems? Possibly. |
| | In my experience, editorial staffs that do serious fact-checking and copy editing are all at large publications where everybody is highly professional. And even in those cases they still make mistakes. None of the smaller magazines and newspapers I've written for have had anything close to first-class fact checking or copy editing. That's not a criticism. It's the economics of the business. |
| | I have outstanding checks and balances here. So do the rest of us. And little of it is done with the kind of petty Gotcha! maliciousness writers often get from readers of print publications. |
| | Without the checks and balances is there a need to be introspective on what we are doing? I think so. |
| | Sure. But not all of us are introspective, and there's no special reason those who are not shouldn't blog. |
| | Are there upsides of blogging and individual publication? Of Course. Are there downsides? Of Course. Did the major News Organization websites cover this tragic crash well and as timely as possible? They did from where I was browsing. |
| | On the whole I think they did an okay job. I think they're doing an okay job on the war, too. The suckage comes from having a story that begs only the covererage that fits the story. That's what we have right now from CNN. Right now, which runs one program that runs almost around the clock. Its title is "America Strikes Back." That's what it says right there in my DishTV onscreen program guide. The same thing is running on several other cable news channels. That's the title of a revenge story. And while not all the coverge is about how America gets back at Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, that's the defining spin. Who knows what we're not seeing because it doesn't fit the "strikes back" story? |
| | Likewise with the two colliding stories we had Monday. One story was "America Under Siege," which ran from September 11 into early October on the cable news channels. That was updated several times by the President and other high-ranking feds, when they told us to be on "high alert" for "anything out of the ordinary" that might be terrorism. The other story was this extraordinary plane crash. Were we supposed to not think about possible terrorist scenarios? Especially when all the terrorist scenarios the TV reporters and talking heads could think of were the kind we had already seen, and when every form of terrorism we have experienced in the last 2.5 months has been unprecedented in nearly every way? What's "responsible" in that context? Should we not say what we think when there is a very real chance that a) it's realistic and b) it appears likely that nobody else is thinking it? |
| | The reason the hijackers got away with flying planes into buildings on 9-11 is that it was never done before. Not one passenger believed these guys were on a suicide mission until it was too late. The only reason the passengers in the fourth plane overpowered the hijackers was that they were informed by people on the ground over a telephone call. |
| | Blogs are new. We're still figuring out what they're all about. At the very least they are writing some all-new rules. I'm kind of glad I don't really know what those are yet. |
| | Once we have some rules, I have a feeling they won't be much different than what an old client of mine had for employee conduct manual. That manual had two pages. The first said, "Rule #1: Use good judgement." The second said, "Rule #2: Violate Rule #1 and you're in deep shit." |
| | Yet even that might be steep. Far as I know, none of us have been in deep shit yet. |
Traction
| | Mike visits the topic of my posting about one possible terror scenario for the American Airlines crash on Monday, and my subsequent "retractions" (which weren't, actually, but never mind). He says, |
| | I think this highlights some of the problems with blogging. It is fast paced. We are always looking for something new. We are often thinking out loud. Thoughts take on a life of their own, even if they turn out to be wrong. |
| | My response: thoughts do that anyway, whether they're published in a blog, in a paper, or spoken over a backyard fence or by a talking head on CNN. Ideas, thoughts, notions, theories... they either catch on or they don't. If they catch on well, they spread like wildfire. This is not a bad thing. This is human society doing what makes it most human: talking to itself. |
| | Blogs are good at spreading, but they are just as good at correcting. I get my links and misspellings corrected daily by readers. The push-back (a term Dave often uses, and takes pains to contrast with criticism, mockery and other instruments of rhetorical battle) here is tremendous. There is potentially huge friction on every idea that anybody floats: water to equal any combustion. I say this is a good system. |
| | One of the things that always bothered me about the press, is that the headline is on Page 1, but the retraction is on Page 28. |
| | Then he goes on to point out that the response, positive and negative, understanding and confusing, proceeded through the next several days. Mazeltov. This is a shitload closer to the ideals of a society informing itself than what we get from television, or even from daily newspapers. Whether it's conversation or volleys of monologue, what goes on blogs is never "content" created to fill X number of pages or X minutes between ads for SUVs. |
Slavery may be okay, prisoners say
Study finds acceptance on par with incarceration
| | Says here "Intrusive ads may be okay with Web users" because "they are about as desirable as TV spots and direct mail." This upbeat spin on the unpleasant comes via Editor & Publisher. Though the story is bylined (by Kipp Cheng), it appears to be a press release from Adweek IQ, which sports the only link in the piece. It's a 404. The source for the piece is an "Internet research firm" called Dynamic Logic, "The Experts in Advertising Research." A .pdf of the study is here. |
| | I'd like to whup these people with an oak clue-by-four but it would do no good. Their coccoon of denial is thick as a bank vault. |
| | Instead I think I'll give them my Aarfy Aardvaark Award for absolute oblivity to punishment. In case you don't remember, Aarfy Aardvaark was an annoying character in Catch-22 who remained calm and serene even when people were punching the crap out of him. |
| | Follow plainly unwanted advertising to the limits of wanton self-justification and you arrive at a Fart of Darkness like no other. |
| | I arrived here this morning by following a trail from Fulcrum to the Cluetrain List (which is has transmorphed into a seminar on blogs) to Commonplaces to Insert Text Here to Editor & Publisher (which treated me to one of those as-desirable-as-direct-mail pop-up ads, for cheap car rental I don't need), to the Intrusion-is-good propaganda in E&P's list of Breaking Headlines. I'm trying to get back to it now, but it's one of those .jsp pages that leaves your browser hung with the progress-bar stuck at mid-load. I guess there's something good about E&P or Insert Text Here ("Word Stuff for Word People") wouldn't put it at the top if its list of the best journalism news sites, and Tom wouldn't have linked to it this morning in an entry that consists entirely of this line: "Ancient Roman blog featured on this nicely done site." |
| | I like going to these places every once in awhile. They remind me of why I left. |
discuss
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