Clive Davis

INSIDERS, OUTSIDERS

"Being an experienced journalist, I do not use the internet as a vomit bag. My thoughts are worked over and then edited. Most of what appears in cyberspace is what Keen terms rampant "digital narcissism". I know there's no point trying to persuade my friend, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, that good things do sometimes come out of blogs. She's right that there's an awful lot of rubbish swilling around, but then there's an awful lot of rubbish in the newspapers too, only most of it is rather more polished than the stuff you see on the Net. What puzzles me about so many of the critics is that they continually focus on the lowest common denominator, which is a little like writing a column about the Independent based solely on a week's reading of the Daily Sport.

I honestly have no idea whether blogging will turn out to be a long-term phenomenon or just another fad. But I do believe it is capable of making a difference. Of course, we're so overwhelmed with competing voices in this country that it's easy to become blasé about freedom of expression. But consider the plight of the Egyptian blogger, Sandmonkey, who feels so intimidated by the authorities that he has stopped posting. A sad, sad story. Would Yasmin describe his site as a "vomit bag" too?  [Via Pickled Politics]

MANNERS

A typically thoughtful post by Reihan Salam on the difficulties of blogging and being thin-skinned: "I'm just so convinced (wrongly, perhaps) that I'm a decent guy that I'm genuinely bummed when people electronically conclude that I should be stabbed."

Another etiquette story: a few days before she left for India, my wife rode her usual commuter train from Paddington. In one of the carriages, two heavily-built young black guys were playing a single hip-hop track over and over at deafening volume. People could hear it at the far end of the train. The noise droned on for around half-an-hour until the two amateur DJs got off at their stop. No one intervened or complained. Heads were buried in newspapers. My wife, who arrived home with a mini-migraine, thinks it would have been crazy to have tried anything, knowing the risks. I think I would have got a group of men together to ask for the music to be turned down. Then again, I wasn't travelling home, weary, on a train service that's maddeningly unreliable, with no conductor on board.

ANGER MANAGEMENT

Are blogs really a place where "everyone has to have their say while no one really listens"? James Harkin thinks so. I don't understand why people feel the need to indulge in such sweeping statements. Then again, maybe it's no surprise, as Harkin was the associate producer on the much-hyped Adam Curtis series, The Trap, (Jonathan Derbyshire has more on that particular subject.)

Amidst all the arguing about whether blogs help or hinder the democratic debate, I've just re-read a very useful essay about the architecture of the on-line world, written by Alan Jacobs a professor of English at Wheaton College. I linked to it a long time ago, but it's definitely worth a second look. What's interesting is that Jacobs started out as a convert to blogging:

As a member of the professoriate, I had long since gotten frustrated with the game-playing and slavishly imitative scholarship of the official academic world—all choreographed in advance by the ruthless demands of the tenure system— and I thought that the blogs could provide an alternative venue where more risky ideas could be offered and debated, where real intellectual progress might take place outside the System.

He soon grew disillusioned. I think he's too hard on blogging as a medium ("the friend of information but the enemy of thought"). Still, his observations on the shortcomings of comments sections - the densely populated ones anyway -  made a certain amount of sense to me. Too much red ink washing round:

Many's the time I have found myself hunched over my keyboard, my hands frozen above it, trying to decide which of two replies to make: the one assuming that my interlocutor is morally compromised, or the one assuming that he is invincibly ignorant. In such circumstances it's always best just to get up and walk away.

Sound advice. PooterGeek has another remedy for blog rage. He spiked his post and ran the test card instead.

QUEENSBERRY RULES

Slightly to my surprise, I found myself agreeing with Jonathan Freedland's complaint about civility, or the lack of it, in blogs:

"Journalists like me have had to raise our game, knowing that a factual lapse will be pointed out within minutes. But that advantage is surely out-weighed by the risk that the blogosphere, which could be a new, revolutionary public space, instead becomes a stale, claustrophobic environment, appealing chiefly to a certain kind of aggressive, point-scoring male - and utterly off-putting to everyone else."

As he says, anonymity is part of the problem among commenters sections, although I'm not sure there's any practical solution:

"At present, you can be an irascible, misogynistic anti-semite online with little or no consequence. But what if that began to affect the rest of your online life? Note how careful people are to be well-regarded on eBay, where money is at stake. Might it not be possible to have a single online identity, one that you cared about, even if it had little connection to your identity in the real world?"

Most bloggers I've read so far have dismissed the idea of a code of conduct. I don't think it's so bad, even if it's no more than a gesture. Daniel Henninger makes the case in the WSJ:

"The admission of need for something called a Bloggers Code of Conduct is about more than just the Web. The deeper import of what may be happening here should be evident in [Tim] O'Reilly's remark, which was the final sentence in a long New York Times article on the subject last Sunday: 'Free speech is enhanced by civility.'  It is difficult for me to imagine a more revolutionary sentence... Free speech we know about. Civility we have forgotten. Ask Don Imus."

No doubt the worst offenders would carry on as usual even if a code was introduced. But maybe we should give it a spin. Some people, I notice, seem to think a blog isn't really a blog unless it has a comments section. I don't agree. Norm copes very well,  and Andrew Sullivan would be crazy to introduce one. Just monitoring his e-mails, during my Christmas stint at his site, was hard enough work for me. One thing that struck me was how often people fired off quite lengthy messages without bothering to read the original posts properly. The venom was amazing at times. It would be a hundred times worse if he opened up to a free-for-all.

VISION ON

Half a millennium after everyone else - as usual - I've finally bought a webcam. Mrs D is going on a working trip to India very soon, visa permitting (that's another story, but I won't bore you with it right now) and we thought we should set up a Skype account so that we'll be able to argue at long range. So, yesterday evening, while I fumbled with the user manual, our household tech expert ran amok with the buttons and began snapping photos in next to no time. Here's one of the first he took.

And here's the one that made me laugh loudest.

THE ANTI-BLOGGER

No need to comment at length on Lord Kamm's latest broadside. Norm responds politely and conclusively. Iain Dale,  Tim Worstall and the Reactionary Snob all make equally sensible points. (Stephen Pollard's thoughts on the problem of aggressive commenters are definitely on the button. Is there a solution?)

Of course, blogs have their shortcomings. But, as ever, Kamm's approach reminds me of that all-round intellectual, Hardfur Huttle:

" Happy medium, indeed. Do you know "happy medium" are two words which mean "miserable mediocrity"? I say, go first class or third: marry a duchess or her kitchen-maid. The happy medium means respectability, and respectability means insipidness, does it not, Mr Pooter?"

I was so taken aback by being personally appealed to, that I could only bow apologetically, and say I feared I was not competent to offer an opinion. Carrie was about to say something; but she was interrupted, for which I was rather pleased,for she is not clever at argument, and one has to be extra clever to discuss a subject with a man like Mr Huttle.

FROTHING

The Times's Robbie Millen doesn't mince his words about certain American commentators:

It's a crass trait of the American Right... to lump all of Europe - from France to Poland - together as one single cheese-eating, surrender monkey entity. You'd have thought that Iraq might have taught US conservatives that "Abroad" is a little bit more complicated than that.

Well said. Want another example of unhinged transatlantic punditry? Here's transplanted Brit, John Derbyshire wondering why Tony Blair didn't send gunboats into the streets of Teheran in order to teach Johnny Foreigner a lesson:

What on earth has happened to the British? What has happened is multiculturalism.  The British no longer feel that contempt for other nations that sustained them for so many centuries.  Or, if they feel it, they guiltily suppress that feeling, as being flagitiously "racist."

He also thinks the sailors who allowed themselves to be paraded on TV should be court-martialled, "with shooting definitely an option." Yes, really. Now, you can have all sorts of debates about the rights and wrongs of multiculturalism (I'm not at all convinced that the American version is really superior to ours, to be honest.) But doesn't it at least occur to Derbyshire that there were more complicated forces at work in this particular crisis? As for the decline of the fine sense of contempt for other nations, well, I suppose education, package holidays, David Attenborough and LiveAid, among many other things, put paid to all that. A fine thing too. Instapundit linked approvingly to Derbyshire's piece. Enuff said. When it comes to matters European, most right-wing American blogs are far interested in scare-mongering than trying to work out what's really happening.

THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH RETURNS

Good to see Greg D back at his post. I'd assumed he was on on baby-feeding duty twenty-four hours a day, but it turns out he's been jetting back and forth clinching a business deal.

HOW THE NET IS CHANGING US

Is more information making us better informed? We all like to to think so. But some people are worried about Net Neutrality and Balkanisation. Yes, our old friend, the echo-chamber again: "Thanks to Wikipedia, you can choose between five definitions of Neutrality," complains one telecoms lawyer.

Even the act of dying becomes a much more public event in the on-line age. (Much as it was in Victorian times, perhaps?) I only met Cathy Seipp once, very briefly, at the time of the Pajamas Media launch back in 2005. We were in the same coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, a few doors away from our hotel. I went up to her table to say hello, but didn't linger because she looked as if she needed a little peace and quiet. As you probably know, Cathy succumbed to cancer last month. Her friend, Sandra Tsing Loh has been tracking the tsunami-like Web response:

Another frenzied wave of posts and hits and "Cathy Seipp" began climbing the Technorati search ratings, past Paris Hilton, MySpace, YouTube and "American Idol." She eventually reached No. 1... Even her grieving friends were forced to admit that she would have loved that.

Into this heartfelt swaying and singing of "We Are Cathy's World" entered the cyber-squatter. This is the disgruntled blogger who years ago bought the domain name cathyseipp.com; as a result, Cathy blogged from cathyseipp.net. What he did on cathyseipp.com varied — first he posted as Cathy, and then he merely posted disparaging comments about Cathy, Photoshopping her and her daughter's heads atop various bodies...[W]hen the cyber-squatter last week reverted to his earlier ways, posting a "last blog entry" signed "Cathy Seipp" in which Cathy supposedly begged final forgiveness for her politics, her friends and her parenting … this seemed to cross a new line.

By week's end, Cathy's family and friends were debating whether to take legal action. Everyone was offended, exhausted and still staggered with grief. The public expression of which — Cathy's funeral — was, of course, recorded without our knowledge and posted by another blogger. Yep, it's all out there on the Web, just start Googling — you'll see snot pouring out of my nose as I wail helplessly through my eulogy, which, along with everything else involving the ceremony, has all already been critiqued online...

And yet, I suppose the whole carnival is fitting. In the high-water days of Old Media, a writer's passing involved a duly-agreed-upon period of reverence, reticence and literary self-restraint. Our grief over a lost talent would dictate a certain vague lionization, and a certain dullness. Not so in this brave new Cathy's World of New Media...

10 YEARS ON, STILL BLOGGING

Until I dropped into Jackie Danicki's, I wasn't even aware that Web pioneer Dave Winer had just celebrated his tenth anniversary.  This is what "the longest continuing running weblog on the Internet"  looked like, more or less, in April 1997.