Didn’t this idea go to the old meme in the sky?

Apr 9th, 2007 | By Steven Hodson | Category: The Social Web

WOWZAA .. we have a code of conduct. I am all for gallantry and warm fuzzy feelings but I really thought that this idea of a bloggers code of conduct has been resigned to the old meme in the sky graveyard. Alas though it appears to have been carried forth by Tim O’Reilly who has just posted the first draft of such a conduct guide.

Don’t get me wrong - I appreciate the whole thought process and issues that first brought this idea to the foreground in the first place but the gut reaction to it hasn’t changed one bit in the last week since it was first broached. It won’t change the blogosphere; or the web for that matter, one bit if such a conduct guide exists or not.

Besides that fact that there will never be an effective way to enforce such a guideline the idea that a code of conduct will even be followed past the first Internet month of its being posted is living in a dream world. After all this is the Internet we are talking about here - the meeting place of the great unwashed masses of humanity. the place where you have be either a six foot Adonis or a Rachel Welch look-a-like when in reality you might live in a one room walkup in a slumlord tenement and have a face covered in pimples.

Sure the whole idea behind blogs is to bring transparency and real-life co-presence to our cyber-lives but that only applies to those that live in the rarified air of the tech blogging elite who have a better chance of seeing what is really behind that mask of one’s and zero’s. For the rest - it’s business as usual and you really don’t know if they are a dog or a cat with a duck hat on.

As I read through the points of this first draft of the code of conduct I am struck by one thing - they are pretty well the rules that we should be following in our daily lives as they are. Things like “We take responsibility for our own words and the comments we allow on our blogs” and “When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take actions” are things that should already be a part of our real life let alone our cyber one. What makes you think that when simple life rules like these can’t even be followed in real life that having some code of conduct is going to make one bit of difference when it comes to blogs.

There is only one blogger code of conduct that will work and that is the readers own sensibility. As long as there are people who like to read inciteful and hurtful things in the anonymity of the web there are people who will pander to them. No elitist code of conduct is going to change that simple fact of human nature.

[tags]blogs, blogging, bloggers, code of conduct[/tags]