Om Malik's pointing to Robert Scoble's friends hammering Andrew Orlowski over the IE7 beta got me thinking about blogging social structures. (The image is from the archives of Johnstown, New York's Colonial Little Theater.)
It's becoming gang warfare, done on a psychological level.
Every top blogger has a gang of toadie blogs that will do its bidding. I got a little taste of that with the Ev Williams mistake (not that I didn't deserve the hammering) When a top blogger identifies a target for ridicule, others can jump in like wolves.
It works the other way, too. When an individual becomes a target a mob of bloggers may take them down, unled. This is what happened to Dan Rather. The story about Bush being a chickenhawk was sound. There was a problem on one of the sources. But a mob of bloggers brought him down, and now they celebrate this, daily.
Tyranny knows how to use such mobs. Tyranny of all sorts, business and technological as well as political. The mob can be like Salem and the victims of this blog mob psychology may, in fact, turn out to have been right in the end.
For bloggers to say "let the market decide" and "let's not have ethical standards" is to turn the world of ideas into Lord of the Flies -- and any one of us can become Piggy at any moment.
The point is we all have power, as individuals, and as groups, in the blogosphere. This power can be abused, it can be turned on people, it can destroy.
Those bloggers who refuse to acknowledge their power, and the responsibility which comes with it, do liberty no favors. They do you no favors, either. Those whom the blogs raise up can be taken down, just as easily and quickly. Without internalized standards of behavior which cause us to shun those who incite to virtual riot, Blogistan will destroy itself.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Jesse Kopelman on August 5, 2005 05:26 PM writes...
You know chickenhawk is slang for child molester, right?
Permalink to Comment2. Brian Turner on August 5, 2005 07:26 PM writes...
The trouble is, as a social ape we're pretty hard-wired to develop social groups and structures and respond to them in different ways.
Blogging is just another form of community experience on the internet - we've been there with usenet and forums. The difference with blogs is that it's pan-domain activity.
Usenet showed the need for some form of moderation - to make the community experience most useful to most people under whichever set of rules and/or guidelines suited that experience most.
And now we have vBulletin and other forum software packages that really empower the administration of online communities by a whole range of means, from disallowing e-mail addy's, controlling user access, and even monitoring and blocking IP lists.
Blogging escapes those bounds, and though many bloggers have a romanticised view of themselves as independent media publishing, they don't have anywhere near the accountability nor ethical frameworks in place that third party organisations can hold non-virtual press to.
So what we're seeing is the inevitable development of the community experience developing on just another platform.
Lord of the Flies? No. Simply a return to the playground.
Permalink to Comment3. bing on August 6, 2005 03:36 AM writes...
hi, i am a Filipina and a blogger, too.
was a victim of a blog gang when i posted SOME POPULAR BLOGGERS entry. it was a disturbing experience when all i wanted was to remind and not malign some of the popular bloggers. i lost some, and win some with that entry. but it had taught me a lesson - to be tough standing to your principles and show everybody that blogging need not be a psychological warfare.
http://warmstone.blogspot.com/2005/05/some-popular-bloggers.html
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