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Monday, December 20, 2004
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MORE BLOGGY-MINDEDNESS FROM UD
[for earlier navel-gazing on the subject of blogging, just look down the page a bit] “I don’t see the point of privacy. Or rather, I don’t see the point of leaving testimony in the hands or mouths of others,” Harold Brodkey wrote in his spectacular memoir, This Wild Darkness. UD is inclined to agree, and she would add that the current anxiety about government and technological threats to American privacy that people like Jeffrey Rosen are expressing (he’s a colleague of hers at GW, in the law school) is somewhat misplaced. In particular, in line with a certain emphasis UD and many other bloggers have lately been placing on the subject of blogging as such, UD proposes to lightly fisk (yes, split infinitive… but it sounds okay, doesn’t it?) a recent essay of Rosen’s in the New York Times magazine [for the article, go to crookedtimber.org and read the current post by Eszter] on the subject of blogs and the way they threaten our privacy. Rosen wants to highlight the danger that irresponsible blogging about other peoples’ personal lives represents. In so doing, he extends far greater publicity to certain examples of this than they’d have gotten otherwise. Although he’s naming names in the spirit of exoneration, he’s still naming names, repeating calumnies in the huge-circulation pages of the New York Times. He is also giving an immense sales boost to the sex-blog spinoff books he mentions. Rosen tut-tuts quite a lot about “Internet exhibitionism,” but he’s promoting it in the nation’s most high-profile newspaper. Indeed, like the sensationalistic bloggers themselves, Rosen goes in for scary hyperbole: “In the age of blogs, all citizens, no matter how obscure, will have to adjust their behavior to the possibility that someone may be writing about them.” Sounds bad! What could it really mean, in practice? Well, later in the article, Rosen gives us one chilling example: A fellow law professor about whom some students blog has decided to “start an anonymous blog of his own.” Shiver me timbers, me hearties. Rosen is also hyperbolic - and misleading - in describing the amount of play blog rumors typically get. He counts hits, not unique visits, in citing the bigtime traffic many irresponsible bloggers get, with one, for instance, experiencing “900 hits a day.” Hey baby - UD gets upwards of 2,000 hits a day, but you don’t hear about it here, because she knows, like all responsible commentators on the subject, that it’s a meaningless number. Rosen concludes his privacy pensees petulantly: “Now that I know that students may be reporting my after-class comments without my knowledge, I’m more likely to be circumspect in private conversations.” Talk about having to adjust our behavior! Rosen is announcing no less than the end of the wild bohemian babble that we associate most strongly with law professors. The beginning of “circumspection” among this most verbally carefree and irreverent group will be a heavy burden to bear. |