As part of 'a wide-ranging attack on the media', Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, has something to say about the likes of us bloggers. He says it - amongst much else - here:
Unwelcome truth and necessary and prompt rebuttal are characteristic of the web-based media. So are paranoid fantasy, self-indulgent nonsense and dangerous bigotry. The atmosphere is close to that of unpoliced conversation...Later in the same speech, and more generally, he says:
Corrupt speech, inflaming unexamined emotion, reinforcing division, wrapped up in its own performance, leaves us less human: fewer things are possible for us. Bad human communication leaves us less room to grow.The phrase 'unpoliced conversation' is unfortunate. Does Rowan Williams think it should be policed, and if so by whom? Is his own website policed? Whether it is or not, being as he is the Archbish, Dr Williams has the opportunity to speak to and be heard by rather more people than he would if he were a lowly blogger. The Internet and blogs generalize that opportunity, democratize it to a degree. The unpolicedness is something to be welcomed and applauded within a democratic society.
But perhaps 'unpoliced' was just too quickly chosen and a word for which the Archbishop wouldn't want to go to the wall. He's still entitled to lament the quality of some of what is to be found on the Internet - the 'self-indulgent nonsense', the inflaming of emotion and reinforcing of division, the bad human communication. Except for the person(s) running each site, however, this isn't a matter for policing or not policing; it's a matter of the prevailing culture in the medium. There are many public sites of discussion in which people don't conduct themselves in the same - uncivil, exacerbating, insulting, abusive etc. - ways as are common in the blogosphere. Indeed many of the same voices that are comfortable with these ways in a blog or comments-box argument would probably not use them in an academic seminar, a public meeting, a letter to a newspaper or an article for one.
It's interesting why modes of address seen as unacceptable elsewhere are countenanced as normal, or at least unsurprising, in blog discussion. Is it that this is not regarded as being really public? But that would be a bizarre notion, since it so obviously is a public space - if often a quite confined one in terms of the size of the relevant public - and it would lose its attraction for those arguing within it if it weren't. It's sometimes said that it's because you can't see your interlocutors, or be seen by them, that people tend to be less civil in this medium than in others. If that's the reason, it puzzles me, at least with regard to everyone writing under his or her own name; it's not as if their identity has disappeared. Could it be that, because the public forum in question here (the blog, the comments thread) is accessed from a space which is itself private, the privacy of the space of origin is in some way, psychologically, carried by the 'speaker' into the public arena and influences his or her conduct there? I don't know; but this last sentence of mine looks like something I might laugh at if I read it in an academic work. What the hell is it supposed to mean? It's at best an indulgence, an excuse. It's clear that you're out there and not just at your computer when you post. Another suggestion: the space on any given blog is like a private space in the same way that a group of friends getting together in someone's house is one, and this despite the fact that the discussants on the blog may not be friends or even friendly; but still, their being together is governed by their own agreement to be, and they may use profanities and insults if those are their 'rules', because it is consensual among them to do so. The difference, though, is that anyone can drop in on the blog discussion, where not anyone can drop in on the group of friends. But, then again, is it that by dropping in the dropper-in implicitly accepts the norms customary on the site?
Whatever the case, improvement in the modes of address in the blogosphere is a matter of the culture of that medium, and not something for policing. Otherwise you get this sort of thing, Microsoftspeak:
The word "demonstration" is taboo, but "protest" is all right; "democracy" is forbidden, but "anarchy" and "revolution" are acceptable. On MSN Space, Chinese bloggers cannot use the name of their own president, but can comment on Tony Blair. "Tiananmen" cannot be mentioned.A Microsoft spokesman said the restrictions were the price the company had to pay to spread the positive benefits of blogs and online messaging.
