I've got to say that objective journalism is starting to get to me a little. It seems to me the idea is to present everything, cite other people and take no stance or responsibility for everything. I don't want the newspaper to be telling me what to think, but similarly I'd at least like for the Times to encourage some form of critical thinking... Maybe this is why I need to stop reading the times and start reading newsblogs...High-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.
Back to the article. (Ps I love that while I don't go to this school, I end up giving directions just about everyday now as I sit out here in between classes and lost prospies and their frazzled parents run to and fro). Ok, seriously back to the article... The human interest/sob story comes from a Ms. Sierra - blogger- who received threats on her blog eventually caused her to cancel a few lectures, ask local police for help and consider stopping blogging all together.
Proposed solutions to blog bullying are; not accepting anonymous comments, creating a kind of accepted code that allows for bloggers to delete any unfavorable comments on their blogs without being criticized for censorship or being accused of impeding free speech, to (as proposed by O'Reilly and Wales) create movie rating like icons to place in blogs, chosen by the blogger, to announce what type of content was acceptable on their site.
I'm not completely opposed to these suggestions. I know of someone who was running for office in San Jose and in an attempt to attract younger voters created a blog. The problem of course was that when some internet jerks (I can't think of any other way to refer to them as) left inappropriate comments on the blog, it was he, not them that was held responsible for the content, and had to chose to close it down.
But on the other hand, I don't think the article addresses one issue. That is, the article talks about free speech meaning freedom of speech, but what about the monetary freedom of speech? When you don't accept anonymous users you cut down on blog bullies, and for the moment most of the blog hosting sites, like blogger and myspace, are free, so it's not that much of an issue... but what happens when inevitably what's free now begins to cost money? What happens when I want to leave a comment on my favorite blog, and I need to pay $3.95 a month in order to do so? Of course as a upper- middle-class privileged white kid who's in college thanks to mommy and daddy's wallets my entering the whole debate about tiered internet and having to pay to get to the good stuff is so much a problem for me, but I feel that if you can pay to get into the internet, which is expensive enough a it is, all the information should be available to everyone.
In short the, as long as it doesn't cost anything more and is available to everyone, I'm not opposed to bloggers being able to censor the content on a space that is in essence theirs. And accountability through identity - though there's always a way around that - seems to be a logical way to go.
Time for class,
ciao
N
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