A few people in the blogosphere are talking about blogging in terms of justice and fairness. I grabbed a few of the longer pieces and threw together. In the end, it tasted delicious.#

Marko asks, "Is the Blogging World Fair?"#

The real question, however, is whether the question as it has been posed makes any sense at all. Clay Shirky is a pioneer in this topic so it is only natural that Marko would focus on him.

Shirky offers three reasons for his claim that the blogging world is mostly fair. All of them are important and perhaps necessary conditions for a just system. But these reasons aren't sufficient to establish that the blogging world is a fair social system. I'm not saying that the blogging world is or is not fair. I'm just saying that the question makes sense and is worth asking. And that Shirky's reasons don't settle the question either way.

[...]

While important, it seems that Shirky's three reasons do not alone or jointly establish the fairness of the blogging world. So the interesting question this raises is: What are the principles if satisfied that would show the blogging world to be a just institutional structure? And the meta-level question: How would we justify these principles to each other?

One commenter writes a very interesting question about the assumption that underlies all these answers:

Maybe this is a naive observation, but it seems to me that the metaphor underlying this notion of fairness — economic competition in an open marketplace — is the wrong one. It treats blogs as micropublications rather than networking tools, and the blogosphere as a broadcast market where channels view for viewers, rather than as a random access database that can accomodate and facilitate all possible queries.

One possible answer to this is that everything is a market, even a "random access database" and because of this it is okay to study anything in general "market" mode.

Later Joi Ito ask if blogs are just.#

Joi first talks about what is means to be just, this is the first step in any philosophical discussion it seems, and often the most difficult: What do we mean? How do will we know when we're done? As you may have noticed, Marko focuses primarily on saying that the ground rules were not set very will in the Clay's discussion.

What Joi then talks about is other peoples' opinions about what it means to be fair or just and whether the blogosphere succeeds at doing this:

I know Dave Winer likes the word "triangulation" and the blogs are good at that. Is it possible that blogs can help us get out of the echo chamberand achieve the Aristotelian Virtue of the Golden Mean? (I know many people disagree with this, but I continue to believe as I argued in myEmergent Democracy paper that this is possible.) danah expresses her opinion that blogs are not an equalizing technology and that it is the a technology for the privileged. To her, fair (and probably just) isn't about having rules that are difficult to game, but rather about being available and designed to promote equality. She is probably more of a teleologist with a bit of correlative ethics and feminism thrown in. (Sorry, just playing with the labels a bit. Don't mind me.

And for me, the most important consideration that Joi makes, is that he says: It is one thing to talk about what the blogosphere IS, and it is another to talk about what we want it TO BE. We have control over our technology and the goal of this discussion is to figure out what the problems are, what the possible solutions are, and how we will know when make them happen.

This is something very interesting to me. Sometimes you have academics and philosophers who write a whole lot, mostly to each other, about things that are in the past or thought experiments. None of it really matters, on its own, because the things have already happened or they were never meant to happen. Other times, you have technologists who create technologies because they can and sometimes they don't have a lasting effect on our lives: Will anyone remember Tamaguchis? Did you just have to look it up?

But, sometimes these two groups come together and you have a way of turning vision into reality. A way of testing out hypotheses that could never be tested "in the real world." Isaac Newton (right? It doesn't actually matter) did a thought experiment, he said that a bowling ball and a feather would reach the ground at the same time on the Moon. Technologists tested it.

Right now, the blogosphere represents a place where experiments and ideas about social networks that existed before the Internet can finally be run. It is very difficult to change and experiment on a culture that already exists, but when a culture is being grown up around you--you can influence it and experiment.

This is the paradigm I'm in: There is not an "American Blogosphere" or a "Russian Blogosphere." There is The Blogosphere. We are "citizens" of our country and the sphere. When Lawrence Lessig wrote Code, he said these things of the Internet. But that Internet he wrote about is gone, but a part of the Internet like that exists, and it is the Blogosphere.

Joi Ito, always the visionary, moves the question from "Are blogs just?" to "Can blogs promote justice?" And writes about how the blogging world will evolve:#

My last blog entry about blogs and justice was a bit theoretical and ended with more questions than answers. Maybe it was confusing. Let me try to be specific. I think blogging will go beyond text and by blogging I mean the whole space that includes all sorts of micro-publishing of micro-content in a highly linked and low-cost way. This includes camera phones, video and audio. There are many things going on right now that will be sand in the vaseline from a technology perspective. Most types of DRM will suck for micro-content distribution. So will things like thebroadcast flag. The whole notion of architecting systems for streaming video on demand goes against architecting systems for sharing. These technology and policy decisions will greatly affect the ease in which we publish and share information in the future.

And later quotes:

In Aspen the year before last, Jack Kemp said an interesting thing, "It doesn't matter what you know if you don't care." I agree, and generally people don't care to learn about things they don't care about.

Right now, you and I, we care. And because we care there is hope.