[iDC] Bloggers Code of Conduct

Fri Apr 20 05:03:05 EDT 2007

I want to sketch a quick reaction to the issues Trebor has written about
below, in preparation, possibly, for a more considered response

It seems to me that cyberbullying and other similar phenomena (in the
UK, for example, 'happy slapping', in which acts of violence are
committed in order to be photoed or filmed on mobile phones and
distributed) exemplify the innate violence of the social, and the
failure of our current phase of capitalism to develop any means by which
it might be mitigated. I want to think about this through a
consideration of the work of French philosopher Rene Girard and his
defence of Christianity (and here I must issue the usual disclaimer that
I am not a Christian and thus I am not proselyting on behalf of
Christianity, but I do admire its cultural force and meaning, and I
believe that, inasmuch as we live in a culture absolutely structured by
its religious history, failure to understand Christianity means a
failure to understand our current situation)

According to Girard what distinguishes humans from other animals is
'desire', which is not an instinct or programmed into us, but is
something that must become activated for us to be human. Desire is bound
up with imitation through which the human infant learns to become human
by observing others. Thus we learn to desire what those we imitate
desire. This is what Girard calls 'mimetic desire', which is positive
inasmuch as it gives us models of what and how to desire, but also leads
to social conflict as this mimetic desire leads to the coveting of what
the other possesses or even what he or she is. This state of everybody
imitatively desiring and coveting the other's possessions leads to a
state of war of all against all, and of social anarchy (sounds a lot
like late consumerist capitalism). In almost all societies this war of
all against all has been resolved through an act of collective, mimetic
violence enacted against a victim, upon whom the general anxieties and
conflicts are devolved and who thus becomes a sacrifice for the purposes
of social cohesion. Thus for Girard human society and culture is only
made possible by such collective, founding acts of violence and murder.
Girard's name for this mimetic cycle of covetousness and murder is
'Satan'. Girard then suggests that, because the victims of such
collective violence are not just the supposed causes of social conflict
but also the means by which it is resolved, they then are accorded
sacred status and worshipped accordingly. This is the origin of the gods
and also the beginnings of kingship.

For Girard Judaism and Christianity both try to deconstruct this mimetic
desire. Girard points out that the longest and most explicit commandment
is the tenth, which states that 'you shall not desire your neighbour's
house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his
ass, or anything that is your neighbour's'. The power of Christianity in
particular lies in the fact that the crucifixion, which appears to
replicate this sacrifice of a scapegoat, is, in fact, the inverse.
Christ refuses to be demonised as an outcast or consequently rendered
sacred. He is instead resurrected, which forestalls the process of
making the victim sacred. That he is innocent thus undermines the
satanic process by which social cohesion is made possible through the
victimisation of the weak and powerless, and introduces the central
concern of Christianity, that of 'concern for victims'. He also thus
demonstrates that the emergence of the sacred is a direct result of
violence. As Girard points out it is Nietzsche who recognises that this
concern is the beginnings and basis of democracy (though of course this
disgusts Nietzsche). The term used to denote Christ's refusal of divine
status, or rather God's incarnation in human form, is 'kenosis' or
'emptying'. 

(Here I start to wonder about the relation between art, mimesis and some
of these religious/post-religious ideas. Art has traditionally been
regarded as a form of mimesis, an imitation of nature. Christianity,
along with Judaism and Islam, has a complex relationship with visual
imagery. The second commandment forbids the making and worshipping of
graven images, which is adhered to in Judaism and has led to periodic
outbreaks of iconoclasm in Christianity. At the same time, of course,
the Christian or post-Christian west has produced some of the most
extraordinary visual art ever seen. Here I wonder if the suspicion
evinced by Judaism and Christianity towards visual representation is
part of their deconstruction of mimetic desire. (There is a lot that
needs to be thought about here about the relation between religion in
general and Christianity in particular and the image, including a
consideration of the difference between the 'icon' and the 'idol', as
well as the relation between the incarnation and realism in Western art.
Also I think there are links to be made to Richard Rorty's analysis of
'philosophy and the mirror of nature'.) What is obvious is that, in a
society of the spectacle increasingly saturated with imagery of all
sorts, such imagery is a source of considerable amounts of mimetic
desire and envy, and corresponding social and cultural antagonism. As
the rise of the modern society of the spectacle became increasingly
obvious from the late 19th century onwards so artists engaged in a kind
of kenosis or emptying out of mimesis in their work (and here we might
make special mention of Malevich, Reinhardt, Rauschenberg, and Ryman).) 

Christianity was, in part at least, a response to and eventually a kind
of solution for the Roman Empire and its contradictions. Alain Badiou
has recently written about the apostle Paul as the founder of
'Universalism' and a universal community. We are now apparently living
not in an empire, but in 'Empire', as Toni Negri and Michael Hardt have
it. The last paragraph of their book Empire notoriously advocates St.
Francis and his espousal of poverty as a model for future communist
militancy. Slavoj Zizek has also recently proposed the necessity of 'the
Christian experience' for dialectical materialists. Of course, even if
'Empire' is bound up with the increasing irrelevance of the nation
state, the United States remains the most powerful nation and is also,
despite the separation of church and state, a country in which
Christianity is politically extremely powerful. Given that the United
States is engaged in the most blatant exercise in victimisation and
scapegoating in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, this would appear to militate
against any claims for Christianity as offering a form of belief that
necessarily takes the side of the victim. Of course the history of
Christianity since its adoption by Constantine as the state religion of
the Roman Empire in the 4th Century CE has involved considerable abuses
of power. 

But one might also follow Harold Bloom's suggestion that 'the American
Religion' is not actually Christianity, but a kind of Gnosticism, which
denies the incarnation and many of the communal aspects of Christianity
in exchange for an elevation of the individual's own self-directed inner
spirituality, a creed perfectly suited to the individualism so prized in
late capitalism. This would Dubbya a kind of Gnostic, which makes sense
in relation to his extraordinarily dangerous practice of relying on a
kind of gut instinct to make decisions. In Omens of the Millennium Bloom
describes himself as a Gnostic, a claim that Zizek takes apart in the
opening paragraphs of his book On Belief. There are some interesting
parallels between the situation in the later period of the Roman Empire,
when numerous pagan and Gnostic cults emerged and competed with each
other in offering salvation and hope to an increasingly anxious
population, and now, when Western Buddhism, New Age spirituality, Kabala
and so on. Zizek is particularly trenchant about the first of these
which he sees as the 'paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism' in that
it allows people to serenely accept things as they are. St Augustine of
Hippo was converted to Christianity following a period in which he
followed the teachings of the dualist Mani. Among the disagreements
Augustine had with the Manicheans was their denial of the incarnation,
and of the fact that Jesus was human.

Erik Davis' wonderful book Techgnosis shows the degree to which our new
media are or have thoroughly Gnostic tendencies. In particular the
repudiation of the world of meat, atoms and the material, in favour of
the world of bits and information, which has characterised much of the
early cyber-rhetoric shows a Gnostic contempt for matter. Similarly much
of the rhetoric around the digital or knowledge economy evinces a kind
of Gnostic eschewal of matter, in favour of faster-than-light,
friction-free capitalism. This kind of discourse occults the real bodies
that are needed for production, including the production of signs, from
the children stitching footballs in Vietnam to the call centre workers
in India, the factory workers in China, and even those in the so-called
developed world working in well-paid and relatively comfortable jobs in
the service and cultural industries.

What we lack perhaps are the kinds of rituals and protocols that bind
together embodied communities and try to mitigate the innate violence of
the social, such as the Mass in the Middle Ages, or the rituals that are
to be found in almost any other time or culture other than our current
phase of late capitalism. This binding together of the community through
the rituals of religion enabled what John Bossy describes as the 'Social
Miracle', which was an expression of the vision of social beatitude or
'state of charity, meaning social integration', which 'was the principle
end of Christianity' from the time of Dante to that of Luther. Rituals
such as the Eucharist, along with institutions such as guilds, and new
forms of social protocol involving the formalising of friendly greeting
were all part of a deliberate attempt to enable the renunciation of
violence. Bossy sees Dante's greeting of Beatrice, which would inspire
much of his poetry, including The Divine Comedy, as 'not simply about
the girl but about the social universe as a whole, a love which
instantaneously occupied the entire social field and burned away the
passions of hostility felt towards any person within it'. Bossy also
singles out the feast of Corpus Christi, which commemorates the
institution of the Holy Eucharist, and which was invented in the
thirteenth century though only gaining popularity in the fourteenth. It
is celebrated on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which in turn
is the feat Sunday after Pentecost. The feast of Corpus Christi often
involved the performance of mystery plays. Bossy suggests that the 'play
of Corpus Christi... meant more than the theatrical performance; it
meant the event itself as a gratuitous release, a representation of homo
ludens under the aegis of the Host'. 

Given the impossibility, at least as far as I am concerned, of believing
in Christianity as an explanation for the universe, the question then
might be, how can we find meaningful ways of binding communities
together, that are appropriate for our secular culture

Charlie Gere 
Reader in New Media Research
Director of Research
Institute for Cultural Research 
Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YL UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1524 594446
E-mail: c.gere at lancaster.ac.uk
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/cultres/staff/gere.php

-----Original Message-----
From: idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net
[mailto:idc-bounces at mailman.thing.net] On Behalf Of Trebor Scholz
Sent: 20 April 2007 03:33
To: IDC list
Subject: [iDC] Bloggers Code of Conduct

"Don't speak-- point," seems to be the modus operandi of many mailing
lists. Isn't it better attention economics to share such information
through the del.icio.us' network feature or other social bookmaking and
referral systems? 

Let me point you, however, to a few links surrounding the recent
discussion on Tim O'Reilly's "Bloggers Code of Conduct" triggered by
death threats against the blogger Kathy Sierra. If you did not come
across this conversation yet, get a speedy introduction here:

Death threats against bloggers are NOT "protected speech" (why I
cancelled my ETech presentations)
http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/as_i_type_
this_.html

CNN Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ6IxYaD774

Exclusive Interview About Free Speech Video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obGtVGfP2Mg&mode=related&search=

Cyberbullying is the term used to refer to bullying and harassment by
use of electronic devices though means of e-mail, instant messaging,
text messages, blogs, mobile phones, pagers, and websites. "Bullying on
the sociable web" may be a better term as "cyber" sounds really all too
80s. And Kathy Sierra is surely not alone. Jeneane Sessum reports 11,000
results for Google search results on her name and death threats. And
bullying is hardly limited to the WWW.

Jeneane Sessum
http://allied.blogspot.com/2007/04/as-long-as-everyones-able-to-leave.ht
ml

Now, Google spits out 139,000 results for a search on the "Bloggers Code
of Conduct." Tim O'Reilly wrote, "Yes, you own your own words. But you
also own the tone that you allow on any blog or forum you control. Part
of 'owning your own words' is owning the effects of your behavior and
the editorial voice you foster. And when things go awry, acknowledge
it." 

After NYT and BBC responded, O'Reilly quickly grabbed his credit card
and bought http://www.bloggingcode.org/. Being the first means that you
own the conversation. Jimmy Wales joined O'Reilly in setting up a wiki
on the topic. O'Reilly suggested, "the idea of sites posting their code
of conduct might gain some traction given some easily deployed badges
pointing to a common set of guidelines." Badges? A-list certificates?  

In the United States it is a federal crime to anonymously "annoy, abuse,
threaten, or harass any person" via the internet or telecommunication
system, punishable by a fine and/or imprisonment." But it's not always
easy for an individual to track down a bully online. 

I think that bullying is definitely not just limited to blogs. It
appears online and off. It is mainly focused on youth and often targets
young women.
Trolls sometimes harass people writing on mailing lists. Online
visibility may also attract stalkers. I'd be curious what you think
about the actual proposed
guidelines. What can be done to stop bullying on the sociable web (and
beyond it)?   

-Trebor

Code of Conduct Wiki
http://blogging.wikia.com/wiki/Blogger%27s_Code_of_Conduct

1. Responsibility for our own words, 2. Nothing we wouldn't say in
person, 3. Connect privately first 4. Take action against attacks 5. a)
No anonymous comments OR b) No pseudonymous comments 6. Ignore the
trolls 7. Encourage enforcement of terms of service 8. Keep our sources
private 9. Discretion to delete comments 10. Do no harm 

O'Reilly's Draft
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/04/draft_bloggers_1.html

BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6502643.stm
Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2054181,00.html
NYT
http://tinyurl.com/24ps3e

O'Reilly is surely not the first to consider ethical guidelines for the
sociable web. 

EFF: Legal Guide for Bloggers
http://www.eff.org/bloggers/lg/

Society of Professional Journalists  Code of Ethics
http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Blogher Community Guidelines
http://blogher.org/community-guidelines

http://wiki.nethique.info/wiki/Nethic_Charter_for_blogs

More comments:
David Weinberger
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/code_nah_codes_maybe.html

danah boyd
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/04/07/cyberbullying.html

Linda Stone
http://surfette.typepad.com/surfette/2007/04/theoretically_g.html
http://blogher.org/node/17319
http://blogher.org/node/12104

Not on board:
Bloggers Code of Conduct - Please NO!
http://radio.weblogs.com/0121664/2007/04/02.html#a935

Civility my arse
http://blogs.theage.com.au/media/archives/2007/04/civility_my_ars.html

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