Thinking Ethics

Blog ethics movement afoot

After launching the Bloggers Code of Ethics in 2003, CyberJournalist.Net informs us of Nick Denton's (publisher of Gawker Media) call for the creation of a Blog Ethics  Committee.  Jason Calacanis has just registered  blogethics.org and has asked Jeff Jarvis of www.Buzzmachine.com to join in. Great news - but how will it be enforced ? If the net is an open space where everyone can voice an opinion, will the collective view of what is considered bad behavior in the blogosphere be sufficient to drive out the perpetrators ? Or are we going to need some virtual tar and feathers ? If they develop into some form of moral authority, will this be very un-net ?

All about ethics

In case you have not seen it yet, Wikipedia has a section up on ethics, that introduces most aspects from an academic point of view, and gives a few pointers too. link

Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents

Reporters Without Borders has released The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents. Funded partially by the French government, it aims to protect bloggers from recrimination and sensors. Also gives tips for tricky countries like China. Downloadable at www.rsf.org.

Blogger ethics

Looking for some information/opinions on blogger ethics I found several interesting and different approaches. CyberJounalist.net (written and published by Jonathan Dube) created a model Bloggers' Code of Ethics by modifying the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics.

JD Lasica wrote an interesting piece on the ethical standards bloggers should follow when offered payments or freebies for buzz in the Online Jounalism Review (USC Annenberg) entitled: The Cost of Ethics: Influence Peddling in the Blogosphere.

For those of you who want the in-depth approach, the full report in pdf (96 pages) of the Harvard University conference on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility,  has been written and compiled by Rebecca MacKinnon. The conference was sponsored by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School), The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy (Harvard Kennedy School of Government); and the Office of Information Technology Policy (American Library Association).

Ethical guidelines for blogs ?

An editorial observer piece by Adam Cohen in todays NY Times calls for bloggers to reform. Entitled "The latest rumblings in the blogosphere: questions about ethics", he pleads for bloggers to hold themselves to the same standards as other journalists, i.e. ethical guidelines, post correction policies and verification. I wish a blogger would send in his op-ed piece on the subject - this article offers nothing but a wish to see conventional rules transposed into the blogosphere. Maybe Tim Aldrich of altfunction could get interested....

Where has the moral compass gone?

Emily pointed out this very current piece in today's New York Times about business school students following instructions on how to hack into business schools  admission procedures (in this case it was Harvard) to see the status of their application. The schools have excluded the students on grounds of lacking ethics, and some of the students still don't get it...

Geeks on Terror

Various important geeks, led by the ubiquitous Joi Ito (an interesting Japanese-American investor-agitator hybrid) are attending the Madrid terror conference and have come up with a sort of anti-terror charter which they're calling: The Infrastructure of Democracy: Strengthening the Open Internet for a Safer World. This is a terrific and concise statement of what I called the EIE (Emerging Internet Ethic) the other day.

It's studded with the kind of unsupported assertions that structure geek thought too: "Open, transparent environments are more secure and more stable than closed, opaque ones" and "The Internet empowers people to communicate and collaborate across borders and belief systems" for instance. These nostra are motherhood and apple-pie for tech thought leaders – assumptions that the Internet generation takes for granted but which badly need some supporting evidence. Still, I'm being unnecessarily cynical: they're better than the top-down alternative, better than blunderbuss diplomacy and better than indefinite house arrest.

MIT Education on the Web

As an add on to Steve Bowbrick's post of February 24, on Digital Disobedience: Intellectual Property, I would like to point out that MIT has made several of their courses available for free on the web under the title MIT Opencourseware. One of their courses is called Ethics and law on the Electronic Frontier, and considers the interaction between law, policy and technology as they relate to the evolving controversies over control of the internet. More on http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-805JEthics-and-Law-on-the-Electronic-FrontierSpring2002/CourseHome/index.htm

Laws, standards and diversity on the Internet

The Internet has no legislative function and no Government. The nearest thing the net has to a lawmaking body is a loose alliance of geeks and technocrats called The Internet Engineering Taskforce (of course, there's a tapestry of other institutions and committees plus the National Governments and wannabes like the ITU – don't get me started...). The IETF devises and distributes Internet standards but its 'laws' are hardly laws at all – even once they're enacted and in use everywhere they're still, impishly, called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The net is a place where real-world imponderables like law and order are remarkably fluid and provisional.

So it's paradoxical that the geeks who run the place day-to-day are so fixated on standards. Standards are the tech world's laws – agreed codes and protocols, some hard, internationally recognised (even with ISO numbers), others informal, even ephemeral. Geeks fetishise compliance with standards. Standards, for these guys, are unarguable – an unchallenged orthodoxy with a substantial moral component. Standards, however, have a downside. They inevitably suppress diversity and innovation. In fact, a world in perfect compliance with standards is, necessarily, a monoculture. The geeks would, no doubt, argue that standards support diversity and drive innovation by permitting communication and reducing the cost of interconnection to almost zero – but this is lazy thinking. Standards support diversity but only at the relatively insubstantial level of expression (up at the top of the Seven Layer Model).

Diversity, if it is to have meaning, must take root at lower levels but this kind of thinking is anathema to the geeks. The idea of running multiple protocols and then arranging for some kind of translation makes them queasy. It screams inefficiency! Disorder! Overhead!. But I imagine a world in which different Internets (for instance) coexist, each a complex expression of some kind of worldview. An explosion of diversity. A rainforest of forms – different in more ways than we can imagine.

This is going to need a big change in philosophy – and we'll need to invest a lot less in compliance and a lot more in translation: we mustn't rebuild Babel on the ruins of the geeks' Jerusalem. Of course, this could all be an infantile fantasy, although I doubt it. I think the unitary, ultra-compliant net of the geeks is a much more pernicious and reductive fantasy than mine...