Save the Drama for Andromeda
Jul 1st, 2008 by Waffles
There is another blog war going on out there, folks, and it’s not all in fun like our little music feud.
My favorite blog, BoingBoing, just posted a notice about some drama going on. Violet Blue, a prominent sex blogger and columnist for SFGate, apparently is up in arms about BoingBoing’s removal of content about her. She says they are censoring her, while BoingBoing responds like this:
Bottom line is that those posts (not “more than 100 posts,” as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.
Respecting their right to keep the posts private, this opens a really interesting question about blog ethics. Some (like BoingBoing’s own Cory Doctorow!) might argue that the internet is (or at least, should be) a free and open source of information, and because it isn’t bound by physical limitations, there is no reason to delete (or “unpublish”) something. Others argue that indeed, BoingBoing is a private blog, so they have the right to unpublish any content or comment they see fit.
Personally, I lean toward the second argument. Xeni Jardin, one of the Boingers, said it best in the comments:
The “unpublishing” versus “deleting” issue is this: the posts were removed from public view while an evaluation of what to do took place. We didn’t want to pay to host them on our blog anymore. This is also why we remove hateful, ad hominem attack comments from public view, too: this is our home, we are proud of the home we built and the guests who visit here with us, and we like spending time here ourselves — so we don’t like to leave piles of shit lying around on the floor.
This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.
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. When new information becomes clear, or someone’s behavior changes, sometimes a creator of work reconsiders what aspects of their personal creative work they’re proud of, and removes them from public view.
What do you think? Post your comments.
Jardin is exactly right. Things like this make me wonder, though, about the ultimate value of the blog medium to journalism; I mean, if something can be tossed down the memory hole so casually, there’s less impetus for fact checking and, in general, all that nasty thinking beforehand. It’s much different from an actual print publication, when you actually have the prospect of thousands of copies of whatever the offending thing is being mailed to people’s houses and archived in every public library forever. And your advertisers seeing it all. (Of course, the flip side of that is the dreadful inertia of print that prohibits them from doing anything even slightly risky—like not sucking the ass of wanna-be fascist tinpot dictators or questioning the authority or moronic religious figures).
That said, “hateful, ad hominem attack comments” is often idiot-speak for “strongly worded stuff I didn’t understand”.