Is easy to understand where Dana Boyd is coming from when she blogs
“As an academic, getting no-strings grant money is becoming more and more difficult. I've been pretty opposed to making moral concessions by applying for grants from DoD, CIA or Homeland Security. There are corporate grants but that complicates things because you have to explain how your work will help them make more money. This inherently clouds research for me. With my research on youth, there's no doubt that i could get a corporation to sponsor it, but would i have the freedom to study whatever i felt was significant? Could i publish everything that i found? Would i be able to get data from competing companies? Probably not to all of the above. Because the MacArthur Foundation funds my work, no one owns it and i can speak freely.” Dana Boyd Announcing the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative
But judging from the frenzied blogger frottage condemning Stephen Downes and Doc Searls , attempts to introduce this kind of integrity into the minds of bloggers is less than easy.
Why should bloggers struggle so to understand notions of integrity – notions of “being yourself” – notions of how we might be naively used in the sales and marketing of others.
Most bloggers are newbies when it comes to writing for an audience – especially bloggers from the notably market unsavvy domains of state education. Edubloggers are for the most part neophytes to the ethics of journalism, marketing and sales. – Perhaps those that blog under the credentials of their institution are more aware of the manipulative nature of their posts – but for the most part edubloggers are the new naïve – we are blogging blind.
This naivety makes edubloggers especially vulnerable to the dark side of “attention whoredom”. We are so blind to the blatant marketing and "Search Engine Optimization" activities of others, that we react in a collective frenzy of "blogger frottage" when someone more savvy like Downes or Searls suggests we have been duped.
Searls talks about “instrumentality” which I think is pivotal here.
Many years ago, when I was a Silicon Valley PR guy, a reporter once said a client of mine — one who schmoozed reporters unusually well — "abused the principle of instrumentality". Meaning that reporters often serve — to their sources — as instruments. And that there is a principle involved that can be abused. That principle has to do with a reporter's own integrity.
The critical questions to ask when you write a blog post are around Paul’s sense of intellectual autonomy – about thinking autonomously – free from the control of others who might direct and control one’s thinking
Reckon Downes and Searls are ontoit on this one
"You should also be sensitive to the fact that other people will use you and your standing as a means to attempt to advance their own. It has certainly happened to me. What happens is they start pumping you up, and then you start reciprocating." Downes
This, I think, is what's at issue with PayPerPost. It abuses principles of instrumentality for bloggers that are no different than the ones for paid reporters — which are no different than ones for any human being. Those principles have to do with speech, and voice. Nothing is more personal than either.
Blogging is speech. Personal speech. When we blog we speak for ourselves. Searls
And I reckon that we should step back as edubloggers and entertain the notion that the value of what we write comes from our independence, comes from out individual voice, comes from intellectual autonomy.
Despite temptation, from the K12 online conference or PayPerPost we must fiercely protect our independent blogger voice from duplicitous invitations to indulge in group blog think, the blogger frottage that encourages intellectual conformity with the self identified A list.
We should ask every day “Do I control my thinking? And be eternally sceptical of our own autonomy when we can answer yes to a question like Does the post I upload today advance my interests and or the interests of a group that has encouraged me to post?
Thanks for sharing these points! I've written some more about this "controversy" online at http://www.mguhlin.net/blog
I encourage you to read Jeff Jarvis' blogger ethic (quoted and linked in the entry cited above). In reviewing that, I'm pretty confident that you'll find Stephen Downes' perception to be off-target.
Take care,
Miguel Guhlin
http://www.mguhlin.net/blog
Posted by: Miguel Guhlin | October 22, 2006 at 08:13 PM
I can't help but feel that stephen downes has raised some vitally important points even though according to Miguel they don't actually apply to anybody (yet)
Posted by: Bill Kerr | October 22, 2006 at 10:32 PM
Thanks for the link Miguel - I especially liked your comment
"In short, blogging allows one to live honestly, express oneself as s/he shares information/ideas with others, to bring a level of transparency to the practice of being an educator, a writer, that wasn't there before for some folks like me."
It would seem that we are both looking for the same thing.
However, I agree with Bill, I think Stephen, and to my mind Doc Searls, introduce questions about how we interact through blogging that should be unpacked, shaken thoroughly and understood. The questions deserve to be judged for clarity, accuracy, precision, depth, relevance, logicalness, significance, breadth and fairness (after Paul) rather than dismissed in a flurry of blogger frottage and personal outrage.
The personal always clouds judgement - We need to look past the personal reaction and acknowledge that these challenges are highly appropriate for edubloggers to consider individually and collectively
Posted by: Artichoke | October 23, 2006 at 08:26 AM
There's always the temptation to say those things which will be well received, that will be valued by the people we respect and aspire to be like. We want to be in the "A" crowd.
Being yourself, saying the unpopular things is harder.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).
If a man does not keep pace
With his companions,
Perhaps it is because he hears
A different drummer.
Let him step to the
Music he hears,
However measured or far away.
Posted by: Tony Forster | October 23, 2006 at 01:07 PM
Thanks for the Thoreau Tony,
Sometimes I think one of the most important things we can do is to train ourselves to be alert to the voices of those who can hear the different drummer. To delay judgement until we have listened with care. This is difficult because the beat is often provocative, at odds with how we see the world, and undermines all we hold dear.
But to introduce ducks to the music of the drum - the wild ducks amongst us have insight into worlds we barnyard ducks don't even imagine
"When the wild ducks migrate in their season, a strange tide rises in the territories over which they sweep. As if magnetised by the great triangular flight, the barnyard fowl leap a foot or two into the air and try to fly. .. All the ducks on the farm are transformed for an instant into migrant birds, and into those hard little heads, until now filled with humble images of pools and worms and barnyards, there swims a sense of the continental expanse, of the breadth of seas and the salt taste of the ocean wind. The duck totters to the right and left in its wire enclosure, gripped by a sudden passion to perform the impossible and a sudden love whose object is a mystery ... The barnyard duck had no notion that its little head was big enough to contain oceans, continents, skies; but of a sudden it was beating its wings, despising corn, despising worms, battling to become a wild duck."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1995) Wind, Sand and Stars
Posted by: Artichoke | October 23, 2006 at 03:20 PM
"In acoustics, a beat is an interference between two sounds of slightly different frequencies, perceived as periodic variations in volume whose rate is the difference between the two frequencies."
Is my frequency ever my own? Is your frequency ever your own? Maybe we all walk to a 'beat'... and a 'beat' is to say...
Posted by: Cherrie | October 23, 2006 at 10:08 PM
Gah! I forgot to cite Wikipedia...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_%28acoustics%29
Posted by: Cherrie | October 23, 2006 at 10:20 PM
A beat can only ever exist as a result of an interaction with another ... love this Cherrie
Reminds me of “All higher [mental] functions originate as actual relations between human individuals”. Lev Vygotsky
Posted by: Artichoke | October 23, 2006 at 10:22 PM
As I've blogged before, we're all hypocrites somewhere along the line. I unfortunately joined the choir of preciousness on Stephen's post and then "thought out loud" on his other blog in a different tone. As I've been reading Doug's struggle with the less pleasant side of his own personality, I think I've also learnt more about my own weaknesses and hypocritical tendencies than about anyone else's actions, real or imagined, from Stephen's posts. Arti, that's significant learning for me. I still think that the K12 Conference will be something I will personally learn from, am happy to have been part of and I know my reasons sit comfortably wihin my meager brain.
Posted by: Graham Wegner | October 25, 2006 at 08:46 PM
The "choir of preciousness" Graham - so very cool - so true - I confess that I am the one singing baritone
Posted by: Artichoke | October 25, 2006 at 09:44 PM
Its' worth reading Stephen's follow up more for the record post on this controversy. He raises concerns that commercial interests will distort the grass roots democratic nature of the blogosphere and that volunteers may be sucked into this without realising.
Posted by: Bill Kerr | November 03, 2006 at 05:26 AM
Thanks for the update Bill - I continue to think that the potential to be sucked in is the important issue in this one for edubloggers "Why should bloggers struggle so to understand notions of integrity – notions of “being yourself” – notions of how we might be naively used in the sales and marketing of others."
It is guarding the independence of thought that blogging provides from flattering invitations to join in a Mackay like "Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds" experience that is essentially market driven
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