on Responsible Blogging

The following is an excerpt from an article published by 'yihfeng' on responsible blogging.  Thoughts follow.

“ What is Malaysia’s constant facination with bloggers? What’s with blogging that is new anyways? It is just another publishing platform for the web. Before the actual “blogging” phenomenon caught on, plenty of people already had their own websites anyways. How does it even make a difference? Why the bad press? Here we’ve got our information minister commenting about bloggers.

He said he believed that professional bloggers were those who were more responsible in ensuring that their web content was based on truth and not mere rumours. ”

Blogger, bloggers, bloggers?

Logically,

…for blog content to be ‘based on Truth’, political transparency has to be true.  It is only where the latter is not true, that web content moves from being ‘based on truth’ to being based on ‘mere rumours’, conjecture and insinuation.  Thus, in this context, the evolution of blogs is dependent on the reality of political transparency.  It is not an ‘irresponsible’ evolution.  Rather, it is one emerging from conscientious and imaginative citizenship – inspired by the certainty of the fallibility of humanity – that serves as the only check on an, transparency-wise, imbalanced system.  Thus, in this case, the source of rumours is not the ‘irresponsibility’ of bloggers, but the inscrutability of politicians arising out of both the lack of transparency and the potential of humanity to be economical with the truth or generous with untruths.  Thus, the first cause of ‘irresponsible’ blogging cannot logically be located in the blogger but in the transparency of the socio-political milieu within which she is located.

Furthermore, it is not only (1)political transparency that has to be true, but the (2)transparency of the subconscious of politicians to their conscious minds.  When the latter is true, and then the former is true, the allegation of ‘irresponsible blogging’ may be true. If the former two is untrue, than proscriptions against 'irresponsible blogging', in the context of this article, is simultaneously a demand that the masses believe that politicians are infallible.

In sum,’ Transparency’ and ‘Responsible Blogging’ share not only a positive correlation, but the former also plays the role of ‘the cause’.