Joi Ito has a provocative post in which he asks
Are Blogs Just?. My wife handles the political philosophy in the family, that being her area of expertise, so I'm not the guy to field the Aristotelian question Joi asks, but I do want to weigh in on the position Joi suggests I have.
Joi says
Aeons ago, Clay asserted that power-laws existed in blogs and that it was in-equal but fair. Maybe he is basically being a deontologist ["rules tell us what is right and wrong"] with a bit of legal moralism ["if it's legal, it's ethical"] thrown in. The rules are fair so it's OK.
I hold an opinion something like this, with caveats (and I love that last February counts as aeons ago -- its all so 'internet time'.)
The original quote Joi is referring to, from
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, is
Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?" Four things suggest that the current inequality is mostly fair. [...]
Note that I say nothing about justness, a word Joi conflates with fairness but I do not. The Chicago Cubs lost the National League pennant last October to the Florida Marlins. This outcome was fair, but not just. I am a Yankees fan, and even I understand that justice called for a Cubs/Red Sox World Series.
This is how life often is -- we go to the movies to see the recovering alcoholic face the challenge of his life, and then, though he's hopelessly outgunned, he puts his heart into it and wins the (boxing match/shootout/motorcycle race/dance competition) and the love of a good woman. We need the movies for that, because it so rarely happens in real life.
So put me down as a deontologist (though not a legal moralist - you can't have written as much as I have about file sharing as civil disobedience and still confuse legality with ethics.)
Put me down also as someone who thinks that the question of justice is in many ways a question of control. Let's assume that the weblog world is not just -- this seems a fair assumption, given that good but recent weblogs often get less attention than poor but older ones, who were here when the A-list slope was less forbidding. What does that mean?
To a number of people (including Joi?) evidence of injustice, even in fair systems, calls for some sort of remedy. I can't imagine a system that would right the obvious but hard to quantify injustice of the weblog world that wouldn't also destroy its dynamism.
1. zephoria on January 6, 2004 2:22 PM writes...
Dunno why trackbacks aren't working, but i responded to this entry at: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/001402.html
My main question for you clay is how you would integrate issues of power and privilege into this debate? Personally, i think that it is dangerous to talk about fairness without talking about these moral questions.
Permalink to Comment2. Seb on January 6, 2004 3:08 PM writes...
Trackbacks sure seem to be working to me...
Permalink to Comment3. Lucas on January 6, 2004 7:21 PM writes...
Imagine reader empowerment via CF and personalized search done right, as I've mentioned in the past on this blog...
The powerlaw is an artifact of the rich-get-richer feed-forward mechanism of popularity-based searches like Google, something you've mentioned in a previous post. I can't imagine why you think it is somehow intrinsic to the nature of blogs.
Permalink to Comment4. Lucas on January 6, 2004 7:29 PM writes...
Not that I think term "justice" is at all appropriately used by Joi. To consider lack of traffic injust is to somehow consider track a right, a bizarre notion...
Permalink to Comment5. Joi Ito on January 6, 2004 7:36 PM writes...
I think I'm with danah on this. "fair" is a pretty difficult term. To me it feels like it assumes you have rules and that those rules are being followed. Who decides the rules?
Permalink to Comment6. Joi Ito on January 6, 2004 7:46 PM writes...
I don't think I'm trying to assert the lack of traffic is injust. I think justice about doing the right thing at the right time and just institutions are those which tend to do just things. In my Emergent Democracy paper, I argue that blogs (because they're not just about the power-law) have the ability to allow minority voices to be heard and a majority consensus building to occur based on a informed deliberative process. If such a system were to function properly, it would be more "just" than the mass media in providing us with their not-so-balanced view and more "just" than politicians who are elected through a broken or no-so-representative method. I am arguing that instead of being deterministic about where this is all going, we have the power and the duty to try to guide the technology and the norms towards justice based on representative inclusiveness and diversity.
Permalink to Comment7. Dave Winer on January 6, 2004 8:15 PM writes...
It doesn't matter how many people read a blog as much as it matters what's on the blog.
Clay you just love these theories don't you, but you're wrong about justice. Justice doesn't apply to who's in the World Series, but it does apply to who's in jail. Baseball is a game Clay.
Anyway, if you have something to say people will read it.
The problem is that so few people have anything to say.
If you don't like the news go out and make some of your own.
That's what blogs are about. Focus on that, find great citizen bloggers and shine the light on that, and you'll be doing something worthwhile.
Permalink to Comment8. Lucas on January 6, 2004 9:24 PM writes...
The big secret is we all want the same thing, egalitarians like Joi, libertarians like Clay (I'm not so sure about Dave :), that is personal empowerment on the grassroots level. Let's not let others play us off of each other. Libertarians are fearful of egalitarians when they play into the hands of the ruling elite by using coercion to achieve their justice, and egalitarians are fearful of libertarians when they play into the hands of the ruling elite by severing emotional bonds with their fellow man. But let's not forget we all want the same thing.
Permalink to Comment9. Mark on January 8, 2004 1:56 PM writes...
re: "if you have something to say people will read it."
One of the fundamental tenets of logic is that, if A implies B, then not-B implies not-A. It's called the "contrapositive".
So, let's deconstruct this statement.
A = "if you have something to say"
B = "people will read it"
If this is true, then the logical contrapositive must also be true.
"If people aren't reading you, you must have nothing to say."
And you wonder why people think the A-listers are arrogant bastards.
Permalink to Comment10. us grants on March 1, 2004 10:05 AM writes...
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