flashboy dot org

So there’s been this internet brouhaha for the past few days, which isn’t of any real direct interest to you unless you have a reluctant but obsessive fondness for Blog Drama!!! (to which I plead guilty). But I think it does illuminate – or at least confuse in an interesting way – a lot of the problems that people are having adjusting to the still-newish world of mass online publishing, so I’m going to try teasing my thoughts out, as much to legitimise the many hours I wasted reading all the threads on this over the past couple of days as anything else. It’s a hugely overlong brain-dump, more about organising my own thoughts – obviously, I’d appreciate any comments you may have.

In brief, Boing Boing, one of the biggest blogs in the world, and a longstanding voice arguing for openness, honesty and user engagement in the public sphere, at some point decided to delete all their old posts that had linked to or mentioned Violet Blue, a generally tedious sexblogger of whom they had previously been rather fond. As is the way with the internet, somebody eventually noticed, it came to the attention of both Violet Blue herself, and tech gossip blog Valleywag. Things spiralled from there - a huge blog that regularly rails against censorship and secrecy had been caught ‘censoring’ their own site, and despite frequent enquiries from other bloggers and the media, they weren’t saying why. Rex from Fimoculous compared it to the deletion of post which had linked to him, which he speculated was because the BB crew found out he’d written a post slightly critical of them. It made the front page of the LA Times website. A MetaFilter discussion began, and quickly achieved some sort of insane critical mass.

Eventually – too late, frankly, once the internet had been busy stewing for several days – Boing Boing issued a statement, which sort-of explained things, but sort-of didn’t explain others. Prior to this, they’d been busy deleting any comment that even hinted at the affair, starting a ridiculous cat-and-mouse game with their readers. Regardless of how justified one may think their original actions may have been (currently, I don’t think we know enough to say one way or the other, but I incline towards the idea that it was unwise) Boing Boing’s reputation has undoubtedly been harmed by this, and their ability to be a clear voice in favour of openness and broad-brush free-speech has been degraded.

But in all the debate about it, I thought the most interesting issues it raised were often overlooked amidst dumb debates about the precise definitions of “censorship”, “free speech” and so on – most of which were irrelevant. Indeed, it was one specific repeated bit of point-missing that struck me in particular.

Personal problems
There was a lot of very heated discussion about whether Boing Boing was a “personal site”, or whether it should be held to the standards you’d expect of (say) a newspaper. But surely this ignores one of the cornerstones of the new publishing world that BB helped usher in – that such distinctions are now so fuzzy as to be practically meaningless.

Certainly, Boing Boing is a personal site, in that it’s still editorially controlled by its founders, that the writers are the only people who decide what should be published, and so on. But it is also part of a for-profit company, and its contributors make (apparently) healthy incomes from it. Furthermore, it has a readership that many newspapers would be (are) envious of, is a major source of information for many people, and has very deliberately inserted itself into the public discourse on a number of important subjects – information openness being a major one of them. It is simultaneously personal, professional, private and public.

And it was really weird to see so many people (notably in the first thread at Making Light), who I imagine would normally would be quite happily suggesting that such distinctions are now increasingly irrelevant, spending so many words arguing over which category Boing Boing fits in.

Of course there’s a world of difference between one person’s LiveJournal with two subscribers and the New York Times, but anywhere you try to draw a line, you’ll find a myriad of edge cases that defy simple classification. Surely rather than starting with the assumption that there are many discrete categories of content publisher, and trying to retrospectively fit whatever you’re discussing into one of them, it’s better to start with the assumption that publishing is publishing is publishing – and to work out what best practice is across the entire field, and what needs to be assessed on a case by case basis.

At the very least, it should be pretty clear that if you want to spend a fair portion of your time decrying the state of the mainstream media and pointing out how much better blogs do reportage, analysis and comment (which I agree with to an significant extent), to then jump back to the position of “but it’s just a blog!” when people hold you to account over something will require – at the very least – some rather dainty footwork.

Xeni Jardin acknowledges this, and tacitly admits that it’s still an area of some confusion for the Boingers themselves, when she says:

This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now… We realize that we’re now bigger and more complex, and we’d probably handle something like this differently now that we’ve grown… This hasn’t happened before.

It must be weird, realising that the widespread public perception of what you do is significantly different to your own view of it, and that it’s been changing right under your feet. But the BB team should have been able to see that these problems would confront them sooner or later – and it’s strange and disappointing to see them be so tone-deaf to the issue.

You don’t control the context
Which (sort of) leads on to my second, connected point. One of the major issues that confronts publishers or all sorts – personal, professional, whatever – is how to deal with challenges directed to them about what they’ve published. That questioning will often come from people who have little understanding of the context of the published pieces – the internet being a magnificent device for stripping work of its original context – and who were never the target audience for the work. The very fact of being linked to changes who you are and how you’re perceived. Something you wrote for your regular audience of four friends looks very different once it’s linked to from a major site with a degree of authority. A lighthearted pop-science story for a general audience looks shoddy as hell once the Bad Science crew get hold of it. That dark joke at the end of your TV column? People who’ve never read you before might think you’re actually advocating the assassination of a world leader.

In this world of shifting context, there’s a range of approaches you can take towards challenges to your content and editorial decisions: a “my house, my rules, if you don’t like it then start your own blog/zine/major newspaper conglomerate” approach; a formal, behind-closed doors procedure for assessing your own practices; or simply an ad-hoc, case-by-case, depends-what-mood-I’m-in attitude. All of these can be valid and justified in some circumstances. But it seems to me that there’s little doubt that – in a situation where you don’t fully control the context of your own work, and the expectations readers have when coming to your site can change dramatically without you ever realising it – transparency isn’t just an ethically appropriate approach, but (and I’m going to write this in bold) transparency is the option that scales best. From LiveJournal to major newspaper conglomerate, from personal comment to investigative reporting, you can apply the same basic principles, and they work – and it doesn’t matter if your audience and their expectations are suddenly completely different one day to the next.

Ironically, the best summation of this approach comes from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, under a year ago, on Making Light:

(1.) Get out there and say something, fast.

(2.) Acknowledge that there have been screwups. Avoid passive constructions.
…

(4.) Give up all hope of sneaking anything past your listeners. You’ve screwed up, the internet is watching, and behind each and every pair of eyes out there is a person who knows how to Google.
…

Teresa (who I have a lot of respect for) is currently the moderator/community manager for Boing Boing. If they’d followed her guidelines more closely, a lot of this could have been avoided.

Post slightly edited for clarity and coherence at 8.27am, July 2.