Watch Your Back

What's most notable about this Forbes article on blogs (by Daniel Lyons) is its hysterical and horrified tone:

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't even figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims--even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high," says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy."

One wonders how many other people, especially people in positions of influence and authority, are soon going to wake up to the fact that "suddenly" weblogs are no longer harmless exercises in diary-writing but opportunities for serious critique and commentary, commentary that often transgresses the established rules of decorum to express ideas these authorities don't particularly like. "No wonder companies now live in fear of blogs," writes Lyons. "'A blogger can go out and make any statement about anybody, and you can't control it. That's a difficult thing,' says Steven Down, general manager of bike lock maker Kryptonite, owned by Ingersoll-Rand. . . ."

What the powers that be seem to be increasingly realizing is that weblog discourse needn't observe the phony conventions of "objectivity" that has made the American news media a risible excuse for stoking fake controversies and for promulgating spurious "information" that has resulted in, for example, the ongoing disaster that is the Iraq war. It needn't defer to the economic kingpins because those kingpins indeed have no way of patrolling the boundaries of acceptable opinion through monetary and commerical manipulations. At least not yet or to a very great extent. Old-fashioned censorship and intimidation may have to do: "Google and other carriers shut down purveyors of child porn, spam and viruses, and they help police track down offenders. So why don't they delete material that defames individuals? Why don't they help victims identify their attackers?. . . ."

There is, of course, a line to be drawn between legitimate criticism or inquiry and scandal-mongering or libel. Bloggers should respect this line. We should be vigilant ourselves in making sure this line exists and is readily apparent to everyone. Bloggers who use the form merely to call attention to themselves or grind an axe should not be taken seriously. (Which is not the same thing as prohibiting them from speaking.)

But you know the issue is really about who gets to separate tolerable from intolerable opinion when the potential damage done to politicians is invoked. One aggrieved businessman described in this article "has had less luck getting anyone in Congress to listen to his plaint. He says that may change if a few politicians get a taste of what he has gone through. 'Wait until the next election rolls around and these bloggers start smearing people who are up for reelection. . . .Maybe then things will start to happen.'"

Yikes.

(Link provided via The Return of the Reluctant.)

Comments

[R. A. Rubin]

Well, whether or not Iraq is a disaster or an unbelievable step forward from Medial Slavery has to do whether or not you are reading a Liberal nut case or a sensible neocon.
Don't you think?

[Sam]

[This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high," says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy."]

I think I'm beginning to understand the difference between blogging and professional journalism. A blogger gives you his or her own opinions, while a journalist gives you the opinions of people who are trying to sell you something.