Blogging

“Danny Glover”:http://beltwayblogroll.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/01/the_rise_of_blo.php at the _National Journal_ has written one of the best summary articles on blogs and their consequences for US politics that I’ve seen. It picks up on something that’s under-reported and under-studied – how blogs change politics through reframing political and policy issues. Most assessments of blogs and politics focus on how bloggers have successfully demanded the heads of Trent Lott, Eason Jordan etc on platters. This is the most visible consequence of blogs – but not the most important. The more fundamental (albeit much more difficult to measure) impact of blogs has been in reframing political issues such as Social Security for the media and other elite political actors, thus helping to change (sometimes in quite fundamental ways) the basis of political conversations. As Dan Drezner and I “claimed”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/blogpaperapsa.pdf the year before last, blogs’ primary impact on politics is through this kind of indirect influence. The Corey Maye case is a good example of a case where blogs have failed to have an impact, as Mark Kleiman (his site seems to be down; hence no direct link) suggested some weeks ago. Even though it created a massive “spike of attention”:http://www.blogpulse.com/trend?query1=%22corey+maye%22&label1=&query2=&label2=&query3=&label3=&days=90&x=37&y=3 on both the left and right of the blogosphere, it hasn’t had wider repercussions – because other political elites (journalists, policy-makers) haven’t picked up on it. But where other political elites do have an incentive to pick up on what bloggers are saying (as was true in the Social Security debate, where journalists desperately needed ways of framing and simplifying a complex and highly salient political issue for their readers) the political effects can be very substantial indeed.

Tom,

I hope that you’ll forgive that I didn’t just put this in your comments. I don’t hold you responsible for them (much as I wouldn’t want to be held responsible for everything in our comments), but your commenters scare me.

I really think that you’re off-base here. There are times when the arguments made by virtually any partisan can be shown to be parallel to the rhetoric of some unsavory character. It’s not hard to squint your eyes and find parallels between the rhetoric of Michael Moore, Howard Dean or Ted Barlow and Osama Bin Ladin. Similarly, it wouldn’t be hard to quote Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, or Tom Maguire and find a somewhat similar argument that had been made by David Duke, Timothy McVeigh or… you know. The guy we’re not supposed to mention. (You may remember that during the 90s, Republican congressmen had a habit of making arguments that were similar to the rhetoric of Slobodan Milosevic.)

But so what? There’s simply no way to defend yourself against this, short of just shutting up. There’s no plausible way to make a case against a war without opening yourself to the possibility that the enemy will ever use a similar argument. (Any patriotic rhetoric will be simply excised by an attacking pundit.) There’s no way to oppose social spending without exposing yourself to a comparison some modern-day Scrooge. There’s no way to oppose affirmative action without exposing yourself to comparisons to racists. You don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of this sort of playground logic, so why take such pains to excuse it when the shoe is on the other foot?

People who make the kinds of statements that Chris Matthews made aren’t really making an argument. Rather, they’re just trying to get a little bit of tar onto the partisan they’re criticising. There’s no principle that they’re trying to establish. It’s just a show of contempt.

And it really does little good to bat your eyes and say that the good fella didn’t mean anything by it. You’ve found an angle at which Chris Matthews’ statement can be literally defended. Good for you. Now read your comments and trackbacks. At your blog, one of the most reasonable right-of-center blogs around, your readers have spent the day lamenting what they imagine to be an alliance between al-Qaeda and the American left. They understand the message.

Best,

Ted

There’s a short profile of me up at the National Journal’s “Blogometer”:http://blogometer.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/01/119_the_kitchen.html today. Feel at liberty to slag me off in comments.

Q: Dear Pajamas Media,

Christopher Hitchens has been noteworthy for his strong support of the Iraq war and the Bush Administration’s vision of the war on terror. Many were surprised when he recently joined an ACLU lawsuit challenging the NSA program of warrantless wiretaps. Could you direct me to any insightful citizen journalism that could help me understand this story?

A: Sure. It’s because he’s an anti-semite.

Pajamas Media is not an embarassing money pit bringing shame to political bloggers everywhere.

A few days ago Matthew Yglesias linked despairingly to a Caitlin Flanagan Atlantic book review/long article on ‘blowjob nation’ (and he wasn’t despairing because it was paywalled). Now I see (via Maud) it is available free online at Powell’s books. It seems to need a comment box; now it has one.

I myself will not comment, except to note that – in a sign of the times – TLS the Times just started a bunch of blogs. Just bought itself a typepad account, apparently. And – another sign of the times, perhaps – this venerable literary organ has allowed one of its tv critics (assigned to the Big Brother beat) to employ this image of herself (semi-worksafe). Like Flanagan, she appears to be named Caitlin. And that’s all I have to say.

No, not another post about how legal scholars are into it. Via Adam Kotsko, I learn that anonymous blogging is a lot less legal than you probably thought.

The fine print of the Waste of The Supreme Court’s Valuable Time Waiting To Happen Act Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act:

“Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Given that for all x, such that x is a political opinion, there exists some y, such that y is a person who will be annoyed by x, hell I’d say it’s no longer legal even for the NY Times to post unsigned editorials on their website. I guess you can invoke some sort of doctrine of double effect here. But you get into a position in which it is legal, say, to intend to damage someone’s political career by criticizing them; but not legal to intend to annoy that person? Am I missing something here?

UPDATE: Comments inform me the Volokhs are already debating this. Sorry to have missed that. (I should read more blogs.) Kerr says it’s just a kerfuffle. Eugene V. says maybe it’s really a problem.

Following up on Chris’s post below, Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions has also written a post on the “pros and cons of blogging without tenure”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/01/blogging_withou_1.html. In favour: name recognition, exposure to other disciplines, increased ability to network, higher google rankings, and ability to talk to non-academics. Against: risks to reputation if your blogging seems shrill or frivolous to colleagues, and risks of distraction from producing peer reviewed articles (or whatever it is that you’re supposed to produce in order to get tenure in your discipline). I’m probably the wrong person to opine on this, as (a) I started blogging precisely in order to talk about things that I couldn’t talk about in my research, and (b) despite these initial intentions, have ended up turning blogs into part of my research, and thus something (I hope!) that contributes to tenure chances etc. But I would be interested to hear from CT reading academics – whether untenured (what are the tradeoffs that you perceive in blogging or not blogging as an untenured assistant or visiting professor or whatever?) or tenured (what do you think of junior colleagues blogging? A good or bad idea?).

Over at Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum has “an interesting post on the difference that blogging, and the internet more generally, has made to legal scholarship”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/archives/2006_01_01_lsolum_archive.html#113683990156732487 . Key points include the speed of dissemination, the bypassing of the gatekeepers that have traditionally mediated between legal scholars and the wider world, and the globalization of legal debate. Larry also has a few words about blogging and how it might affect your career as an academic lawyer (including some cautionary words for the untenured). Go take a look.

As noted earlier, last month I was interviewed on Milt Rosenberg’s Extension 720 radio show in the company of Dan Drezner and Sean Carroll, two other Chicagoland academic bloggers. Segments of the interview are now available as an mp3 file. The first part of the podcast is from another interview. If you want to skip ahead to the sections from our show then here is where you’ll want to slide the player once the file has loaded:

Bob Stein at if:book has a legal/ethical/tactical question about CC and non-commercial use:

there’s a site [but I’m not going to link to the pesky bugger – JH] that reposts every entry on if:book. they do the same for several other sites, presumably as a way to generate traffic to their site and ultimately to gather clicks on their google supplied ads. if:book entries are posted with a creative commons license which allows reuse with proper attribution but forbids commercial use. surferdiary’s use seems to be thoroughly commercial. some of my colleagues think we should go after them as a way of defending the creative commons concept. would love to know what people think?

If you want to view the splog in question, there’s a link in Bob’s post. (Click here for a wikipedia definition of ‘splog’.) It seems clear splog use cannot possibly be non-commercial. As to whether the if:book folks should care, one commenter writes: “Whether you want to go after this splogger is your choice, but in general I think bloggers should welcome addition exposure and treat it like an advertising opportunity. I don’t think splogs are a good thing, but RSS makes all kinds of syndication possible – legitimate or otherwise…”

I’m curious about a different question: how exactly does this CC license define the ‘commercial purposes’ bit of ‘you may not use this work for commercial purposes’? For example, good old J&B Have A Blog has a sidebar of Amazon links; I do the Amazon associates thing. I make a couple bucks. What makes our site different than a splog is, among other things, that small sums we earn are definitely not the point. But I’m not sure how that could be legally codified. ‘Non-commercial’ doesn’t seem the best way to capture ‘incidentally commercial’, or ‘not PURELY commerical’. No doubt the wise prof. Lessig has considered this, but I don’t know what the answer is. Do you?

In case it isn’t clear what I am asking, I think it’s this: the point of a CC license is to allow people to republish content with certainty that they are legally permitted to do so. What allows a blogger or web-publisher with incidental advertising to KNOW that they are a non-commercial user?

UPDATE: I actually have popped the hood on the license and looked inside. But I’m not sure I understand what the legal thing that ‘not for commercial purposes’ means really MEANS, in practical terms:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

Amazon associates and googleads provide monetary compensation. On the other hand, there is that ‘primarily intended’ clause. But that’s vague. The point of a license is to give users confidence they are in the clear. Perhaps there need to be test cases, and just haven’t been any yet?

Actually, the problem may be ambiguity: ‘…in any manner that is primarily intended.’ Does that mean the manner in which I make my blog as a whole? Or the manner in which I make an individual link with an embedded Amazon associates ID? Makes a bit of a difference.

Following the publication of a “BBC list of the 10 worst Britons of all time”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4560716.stm , there’s now a meme going round “listing nominations for the 10 worst Americans of all time”:http://www.allthingsbeautiful.com/all_things_beautiful/2005/12/a_challenge_to_.html . The propensity of “conservative” blog commenters to include Jane Fonda, MLK, or Paul Robeson on their lists is somewhat worrying … Still, nominations for either Britons or Americans are welcome in comments below. My own personal nomination for the worst American of all time would be the person most responsible for the TV series Friends. There should be a special place in hell reserved for that individual. (via “Lawyers, Guns and Money”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/12/10-worst-americans.html , where Robert Farley has a sensible list ).

I’ve been quite skeptical in the past about the power of the Internet to change politics in authoritarian states. If this “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/16/AR2005121601709.html story bears out, I may have to change my mind.

bq. In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week? A close look suggests an answer that China’s governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu’s essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event — the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

bq. In the 10 days since the shooting, which witnesses said resulted in the deaths of as many as 20 farmers protesting land seizures, the Chinese government has tried to maintain a blackout on the news, barring almost all newspapers and broadcasters from reporting it and ordering major Internet sites to censor any mention of it. Most Chinese still know nothing of the incident. But it is also clear that many Chinese have already learned about the violence and are finding ways to spread and discuss the news on the Internet, circumventing state controls with e-mail and instant messaging, blogs and bulletin board forums.

This shouldn’t be overestimated – it sounds as though discussion is only confined to a smallish elite, and in any event, _contra_ blog evangelists, argument over the Internets is not in itself a major political force for change. But it’s something new, and perhaps something that’s going to become more important over time.

“Pootergeek has a post”:http://www.pootergeek.com/?p=1908 on using “Google’s blogsearch”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch as an alternative to Technorati. For full instructions follow the link to his site, but meanwhile “here’s the search set up for Crooked Timber”:http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&scoring=d&filter=0&q=%22crooked+timber%22+-site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fcrookedtimber.org%2F&btnG=Search+Blogs

Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution blog is in the process of retranslating “The Project” from a French translation published in a Swiss newspaper. Apparently “The Project” is a secret document which outlines the secret plan of the Muslim Brotherhood to infiltrate European institutions, secretly take control of European governments and rule the world. Understandably, Scott is at pains to tell us that “this isn’t a conspiracy theory”, but I think he’s batting on a sticky wicket here; he’s got a theory, and it’s about a conspiracy, so there is no other two-word phrase which describes it more accurately than “conspiracy theory”. Scott himself appears to have a tiny bit of critical distance preserved from this material, but he’s not exactly shying away from the conspiracist interpretation and there are plenty of people in the Daily Ablution comments section who have really gone off at the deep end in the most hilarious fashion possible.

Welcome to the wacky world of conspiracy theories guys is what I say. As a frequent inhabitant of conspiracy mailing lists, can I offer the following advice:
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