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January 23, 2005
Ethics, blogging, and blogging ethics...
The first time I used a blog to teach English composition I assigned Rebecca Blood's The Weblog Handbook as the class textbook. Besides offering a complete course in beginning blogging, her book also gives some good advice about writing.
As a bonus, the book discusses the ethics of blogging--an ethics based on the form of blogging as it had evolved to that point. It's a topic of much interest right now. Here's an example: Link to your sources. This ethic springs from what the web is (a network of links) and what blogs started as (daily links to interesting stuff on the web).
For the most part, I agreed with the ethical behaviors Blood identified but with one exception: I disagree that errors should be left for all to see even after correction. Let's use my post from yesterday as an example. I misspelled "compliment," or, rather, I did something I tell students not to do, which is I relied on a spell checker. I wrote "complement."
A reader publicly pointed out the mistake in a comment. By my ethical standards, I prefer to point out such silly little errors in private e-mail (and only to those I have a good blogging relationship with) because I intensely dislike causing embarrassment to others. And, frankly, the middle class fetish with correctness is so ingrained in our society that the thought of making what amounts to silly, inconsequential errors gives people the nervous sweats. It also makes teaching writing and journalism more difficult.
(In case you're wondering: No, I do not teach journalism students that it's okay to make mistakes. I teach them that it's not okay to make others feel stupid about making mistakes. And I teach them that standard academic English is one dialect among many. I don't want them operating in the public sphere with the pernicious notion that people who speak and write differently from them are not smart and not worthy of attention.)
Here's what Blood might suggest I do: "I consider that effort a great complement compliment."
One could use the same technique to correct all kinds of errors--from grammatical to stylistic to factual. I simply do not see the need. If a blogger is running an otherwise open and honest blog, errors of fact--the important stuff--may be challenged and debated. A public record is created. This just makes for better and more interesting blogging.
I wonder about the possibility of asserting an ethical code for blogs in general. There is no institution, only a medium.
Journalism has an institution of sorts. And most news organizations follow the code of the Society of Professional Journalists or something close to it. Few organizations exist for bloggers. But look how many of those SPJ ethical standards good bloggers accept as a matter of course!
Group blogs form institutions and perhaps operate with ethical standards understood, if not articulated, by the authors. And individual bloggers may assert individual ethics. I do. You may read them here.
It seems to me that attempting to establish a code that covers the diversity of weblogging is an endeavor much like herding cats.
UPDATE: (6:40 p.m.): I'll write a little next week about the Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference.
Posted by acline at January 23, 2005 4:16 PM | | Spotlight