Last class blues, part 2
This is way too down-to-earth to constitute anything more than a small part of our final discussion. Nonetheless, you probably saw this wikipedia freak-out. And that makes me think we could talk again about the rules (should there be any in a frontierland?) and the status of information in the blogosphere, a subject dear to the heart of John.
But this class likes to think deep, outside-the-lines thoughts. So play a little of His Royal Badness and think about crazy stuff we could talk about.
posted by Printer's Devil @ 11:07 AM
5 Comments:
There's no way to read that and not be affected by his words. "I was also his pallbearer" sent chills down my spine. We have mentioned many times the potential for abuse on blogs, but nothing brought it home quite like for me.
Danah Boyd and Jimmy Wales respond to the Wikipedia story.
Danah's blog, Apophenia, is a great resource for some of the students' papers, methinks. Dig through the archives...
The sad truth is, the New York Times and Washington Post do this too. Remember Gary Webb, who broke the story of CIA/Contra crack trafficking in L.A.?
http://www.fair.org%252Findex.php%26inv
Never an apology from the "paper of record", after they quietly withdrew their own character assassination of Webb, whose career was ruined (and who eventually committed suicide) as a result.
Certainly, the 'sphere will contain more mistakes, but it makes less pretense of pure 'objectivity'.
...lo and behold, as if on cue, another example of MSM (NY Times, again) getting an accusation wrong... see Colin's link above to the interviews with bloggers to the link to Kausfiles
(http://web.archive.org/web/19991012062747/http://kausfiles.com/index.html)
Forgive me ahead of time for rushing in like a fool, but all intelligent discussion aside, what about the most immediate reaction: how do we know these are false accusations?
Also, I have to agree with Chris: if something like this showed up in MSM, it would be far more difficult (if not impossible) to fix.
Post a Comment
<< Home