rules? i don't need no stinkin' rules!

| 5 Comments | 8 TrackBacks

Everywhere you look these days, bloggers are writing policies and rulebooks. For themselves, for others, for everyone. With calls for accountability, integrity, consistency, appropriateness, and ethical behavior, it seems that every blogger I know is publishing their own set of guidelines for blogging.

Feh. A pox on all their rules, that's what I say.

How many of us have published rules to govern how we talk to our friends? I'd be horrified if a friend had to consult his or her published personal policy statement before saying something to me (or correcting a misstatement, for that matter).

In his wonderful essay "A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy," Clay Shirky talks about persistent patterns in online groups:

In the political realm, we would call these kinds of crises a constitutional crisis. It's what happens when the tension between the individual and the group, and the rights and responsibilities of individuals and groups, gets so serious that something has to be done. And the worst crisis is the first crisis, because it's not just "We need to have some rules." It's also "We need to have some rules for making some rules." And this is what we see over and over again in large and long-lived social software systems. Constitutions are a necessary component of large, long-lived, heterogenous groups.

I buy Clay's argument. Except for one thing--I'm not sure I think of (or want to think of) webloggers as a "group," any more than I want to think of "writers" or "poets" or "programmers" as a group. My weblog is simply a tool that allows me to publish thoughts, questions, and ideas online. It's not an application for citizenship in "Blogaria" or "Blogistan" or any of the other geographic metaphors people use to describe the diverse collection of self-published websites that blogs have enabled.

I don't want a rulebook. I have my own sense of right and wrong in my head, and I use it to guide my writing. I pulled a post--once. It was something I wrote about my personal life, and though it was oblique in its references, it hurt someone I care very much about. Leaving it online would have compounded that hurt by extending the number of people who read it. So I pulled it a few hours after it went online. Expunged it from my archives entirely. Asked the one person who'd linked to it to remove the link. It never made it into any republished versions of my RSS feed, so for all intents and purposes it's been "disappeared."

Was that unethical? According to most of "ethical blogging guidelines" I've seen out there, it would be considered as such. But I know I did the right thing, and that's really all that matters to me. I'm rather glad I hadn't written public rules for myself that would have caused me to rethink or regret (or worse, not take) that action.

David Weinberger has written about the concept of "leeway," and it's that concept that I see missing from most of what I see. He also spoke at Supernova this year about the problem with making social relationships explicit. He said "When I make trust explicit, I kill trust." (When was the last time you said to someone "I trust you explicitly"?)

Jonathon Delacour writes that "I've never set out to 'deceive' anyone, though in retrospect it would have been infinitely better to have made it explicit much earlier that my interests (and my writing) were shifting from writing conventional weblog entries to telling stories. I regret that I didn't. Take this, then, as a belated announcement."

I rather wish he hadn't done that. The explicitness of his "ethical guidelines" and his announced direction for his writing somehow diminish for me the experience of reading his blog. That makes me sad.

I don't know whether the current flurry of calls for accountability will snowball, or simply die away. I hope for the latter, but I'm braced for the former. Don't be looking for any published guidelines here, though. You'll have to trust me implicitly, or not trust me at all.

(For more reading on this topic, I suggest taking a look at what Jonathon Delacour, Jill Walker, Mark Pilgrim, Chuck Tryon, Shelley Powers, and Dave Winer have to say on the topic. I know I've missed some--feel free to add your own "ethical guidelines" or "personal posting policy" link to the comments here.)

8 TrackBacks

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Social Hardware from Matthew G. Kirschenbaum on August 9, 2003 11:52 AM

Via Slashdot, this Slate piece on internet book piracy. The basic point is that as illicit page scans (such as those made of Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix) or outright hoaxes (such as the "new" Naked Chef cookbook) Read More

In rules? i don't need no stinkin' rules!, Liz Lane Lawley questions the proliferation of ethical rules, guidelines, and suggestions for weblogging, seeing them as overly declarative and restrictive for a medium that is so self-directed and self-correc... Read More

Truth and Blogging from the chutry experiment on August 12, 2003 12:48 PM

I'm still in the process of collecting links about the ethics of blogging. I think it is an important topic in terms of defining blogs. In my original post, I commented that "My own tendency is to avoid revising." Oddly... Read More

He Claims it Never Happened Liz, a women of good humor and good sense, has a wonderful post on rules for bloggers. Read More

This is a blog entry about Mark Lichtenstein. Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark, Mark�, I do this because my good friend, Mark, always asks me if people have stopped asking me to their houses because they fear that... Read More

There are two groups that predictably object to guidelines in any given context: those who need them the most, and those who need them the least. Liz Lawley responded very quickly to my earlier posts about guidelines, and no surprise... Read More

5 Comments

hey. I stumbled onto your log here searchign for "wireless Rochester".
I don't know if you know, or care, but http://www.wififreespot.com/ny.html is a list of free wifi spots in NY, including quite a few in Rochester.

Oh, hear, hear, Liz. Well put. Next time I feel like I have to account for my blogging I'll reread this :)

What Jill said, along with a heartfelt, "thank god someone said this!"

I love blogging. I hate rules. I love finding odd snippets on the web. I enjoy discovering context for them, and rediscovering context for them as time goes by.

And, as a writer who mentors other writers, I particularly enjoy it when a blogger bursts into fiction without warning.

I started to comment on this back in May: http://www.hitthosekeys.com/archives/months/may03.html#p23 but I don't think I went far enough. "We don't need no stinkin' rules" seems to cover it. : )

It's really up to the blogger to make their own rules. I totally agree. That is part of what gives each blog its own personality in the first place!

Liz: I'm delighted to hear you and xian saying this. It's like a horrible repeat of what business tried to do with Communities of Practice -- define them, restrict them, manage them, put boundaries around them. In the process they almost killed them. The blogosphere is a self-organizing, self-managing system, and not only does it not need any damn rules, it doesn't need any rule-makers either. Let's pre-empt this threat tout de suite. Are there any colours left for a 'Keep the Blogosphere Free' ribbon campaign?

 

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This page contains a single entry by Liz Lawley published on August 8, 2003 3:55 PM.

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