Why a bloggers’ code of conduct is a bad idea

April 9, 2007 in Blogs, Media

by Jay Stevens

There was a recent spate of talk about a post by tech blogger Kathy Sierra, which revealed the death threats she’s received on her blog and her feelings dealing with them. Unfortunately, such virtual cruelty is common in the ‘sphere – h*ll, I’ve received a few myself. Sierra’s threats were meet with widespread condemnation and plenty of media scrutiny. Threats are scary, and I’d love to live in a world where I – or any other blogger – didn’t have to live in fear of her life in order to state opinions, even the puerile found here.

But that these threats have spawned a “blogger code of conduct”…yech. What a terrible idea.

Oh, the proposed conduct code is harmless enough at first glance, a promise for civility, a vow to contact folks privately first before taking their disputes public, some guarantee for not publishing libel, etc. A closer look, however – like this one taken by Tristan Louis — shows the myriad possible legal entanglements bloggers may encounter by following such a code of conduct.

Louis may be overreaching or seeing trouble where there is none, but to me the important part of this story is that this signals the potential death-knell of blogging, an end I’ve been predicting ever since I started blogging. The political activity represented and encouraged by blogs since the early stages of the 2004 election has been staggering and encouraging – but I think we won’t see much influence beyond 2008. In fact, 2008 may be both our biggest triumph and the end to the vitality of the form.

Here’s the thing. Once blogs get enough attention and respected, they will be assimilated by big-money media. Already “citizen” bloggers have seen competition from the likes of Joe Klein and other pundits-turned-bloggers, who are given instant credibility and an audience by their corporations. Still, there’s enough distrust of traditional media to keep the smaller blogs alive. But as soon as big business finds a way to isolate or discourage bloggers, they’ll implement it.

One way would be to use the proposed pay-for-bandwidth scheme the telecomm companies are cooking up. All they’d have to do is jack the prices up for bandwidth high enough so that only the monsters of the ‘sphere – Kos, C&L, TPM, say – can afford to provide high-speed performance to their users, and the amateurs would be shunted off into their little virtual alleyways.

Another way would be to exploit the self-created “blogger code” to create a small, select group of blogs who control entry or exit into the group. Any blog denied a certificate deeming them responsible or ethical, or whatever ,would be denied links, references, exposure. Such a small group isn’t hard to imagine, too. Who wouldn’t take up the money, exposure, and influence of being a sitting member of the “board of blogs”? And then the ‘sphere devolves into a few online Broders and Friedmans featured on the websites of Disney, Qualcomm, and GM Motors. (What makes this code of conduct scenario more plausible is that something similar happened to the comic and movie industries.)

Combine the two – the lack of exposure and bandwidth — and you can kiss the vitality, originality, and, yes, the crudity of blogs good-bye.