Reading Response #2

“Say Everything” does a very good job of outlining the benefits of blogging, such as the ability to create your own unedited content, the freedom of full disclosure, and the beauty of a diverse blogosphere where you can find almost any point of view.  In Chapter 3, Rosenberg even gives us a dose of Battelle’s medicine with a lesson on linking.  As we learned in The Search, Rosenberg confirms that links confer authority—and he demonstrates it clearly with the story about Jorn Barger.  Linking, and keeping track of the number of links that a certain webpage or blogger is getting at a certain time, reflects real-time authority.  Is a page currently authoritative, has it gained notoriety, or has it lost it?  Chapter 3 of Rosenberg’s book reinforced the lessons that we’ve had in the first 3 weeks about links.

But I must also say that I’m not sure about one of Rosenberg’s arguments later on in the book.     In Chapter 8, Rosenberg echoes the advice of “veteran bloggers,” saying, “to blog…is to present the truth of your life or the world as you see it” (236).  After reading this chapter, I’ve been having a hard time trying to decide how I feel about the identity issues behind blogging… How do you know who the person behind the blog really is, or how they really feel about things?  And more importantly, how real should they be?

I think that these questions are complicated with the new trend of government blogs.  And let’s face it: the U.S. government is in to blogging these days.  The White House has a blog, the State Department (my future employer) has DipNote, its official blog, and several other federal agencies are blogging, as well.  It’s very plausible that, one day, I’ll find myself on the other end of one of these Gov 2.0 blogs.  So here’s my question: how much can a civil servant really reveal about him/herself?  What if they don’t agree with a policy or don’t like a certain official?  In their government blog, which they must sign with their name, they can’t say that.  So how can they really keep it real?  In fact, there are many things that government employees have to censor themselves on because they are representing the Administration that they work for.  It seems to me that this is going to limit how genuine and how interesting government blogs can get… at least if you judge the value of blogs with the criteria that Rosenberg presents.

Meanwhile, political bloggers like the guys and gals that Rosenberg writes about in Chapter 5 can bite back at the government with real teeth.  They can defame politicians, use foul language, and be a lot less formal than government bloggers can be.  So it seems like government blogs are doomed from the get-go.  Maybe the pro-government bloggers who write independently can make it a little bit of a more even fight where both sides are represented, but it still seems like the government is really handicapped in the cold, harsh blogosphere that exists today.  For the federal bloggers that aim only to present the facts–what the Administration has done, when, and how–perhaps this issue will not pose much of a problem.  But for the bloggers who have tried to get personal (though their position clearly prohibits them), I fear it’ll only become a bigger and bigger problem.

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