To blog or not to blog? There is no question

There are plenty of "is blogging dead?" discussions floating around out there. I've read through some of the arguments either way and think there's a context that's missing in the discussion. 

For the record, I'm of the opinion that blogging is not only alive, and well, but is both necessary and in no ways threatened by other social or microblogging alternatives which really do not compete in the same space at all, if people slow down and think about it.

Historic context for the importance of freedom of speech and a free press

• "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. " Thomas Jefferson, 1787.

• "...insomuch as I could heartily desire, copies of ... magazines, as well as common Gazettes, might be spread through every city, town, and village in the United States. I consider such vehicles ofknowledge more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry, and ameliorate the morals of a free and enlightened people." George Washington, 1788.

Widely available no doubt, I found these above two quotes at http://www.historicpages.com/nprhist.htm and they quickly put the matter in right context - freedom and a free press go hand in hand (although one might assume this requires no clarification, let's be clear - "free" as in freedom from government control, not free with respect to cost). A free press stands opposed to a press that functions as an organ of the state, a machine for producing propaganda.

There were over 11,000 newspapers circulating in the United States in 1880, with a fair mix of independent papers encouraged by the apparent success of  William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator. Determined to effect change in America, Garrison believed a newspaper provided the platform for his voice to reach far and wide and influence thought. He published weekly between 1831 and 1866, never missed a week over those 30+ years, and soon after the Emancipation Proclamation, he shut down operations, satisfied he'd seen the fruition of his labours. For every cause, noble or otherwise, there were independent newspapers trumpeting their messages, speaking to social issues, bringing people together, organizing, educating and informing...

Forces pulling a free press apart

But we still have a free press, right? Not so fast. At this same page at HistoricPages.com, there is a "for further reading" section that include the ominous:

"II. Modern Journalism.

The radical changes in news reporting that have occurred since the Vietnam War era are among the most problematic in our history for the student of freedom of the press. The following are recommended introdcutions [sic] to this troubling phenomenon that affects every American.

• ·        Crossen, Tainted Truth, Touchstone, 1994. Effectively documents what its subtitle calls "The Manipulation of Fact in America" by the media

• ·        Manoff and Schudson, eds., Reading the News, Pantheon, 1986. A good guide to sifting through media bias and inaccuracy.

• ·        Squires, Read All About It!, Times Books, 1993. Excellent documentary of the corporate takeover of America's newspapers and the threat to democracy posed by their highly censored and self-serving reporting.

• ·        Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying, Free Press, 1994. A chilling study of the pro-government corporate propaganda machine that the author argues has replaced our once-free press."

The Guilded Age, leveraging the Industrial Revolution, soaked up independents into corporate conglomerates, and in so doing reduced the independent voice. The concept of freedom of the press was to prevent media from being controlled by the state for propaganda, and to provide a tool for the people to hold government accountable to the people. These are foundational democratic principles. As such, media should not be owned by a government. However, if the government isn't going to own the press, then it's going to be privately owned, and private ownership is typically justified and driven by a profitability mandate for the owners, with resulting exposure to conflict as discussed here.

Today, western society newspapers are owned by very large corporations, which is necessary since print and distribution require extensive capital, equipment and logistics. Average people with an opinion to share can't afford to start up a newspaper and disseminate their ideas in a cost-effective manner. This is not so good, because what we're talking about is freedom of speech and freedom of assembly - the opportunities to create community and speak to issues in a democratic society should not be overly cost-prohibitive.

Sticking close to the ground

The internet provides access and tools for regular people to engage in public discourse. Blogging supports open long-form in a way few proprietary platform social media services can. And, forget about paper. Paper is great for controlled environments of limited scope (a newsletter in a corporate office, for example). Distribution of paper, however, is costly. For exponentially less money (even without owning a computer and paying for internet access, renting a computer at an internet cafe has some cost, or using computers available at public libraries are still paid for through taxation), online services provide far more reach.

Which isn't to say I don't like other social media services. They all have their place. For example, just a few weeks ago, I experienced my first earthquake. It was really a tremor, but it was 6 seconds like nothing I'd ever experienced before. As soon as it happened, I tried to access news internet sites, but they were crawling, not responding (I guess everyone else headed there as well). I then went to Twitter and did a search for "tremor Toronto". There were 30 hits of questions such as "did I just feel an earthquake?" along with "was there a subway crash?" or "did a bomb just go off near G20?" As I scanned the search results, the numbers kept increasing - 30 hits became 87 hits became 146 hits...and the questions were coming from Ottawa, and Barrie, and mid-Ohio area, and New York, and as far south as Baltimore. It took 5 minutes for me to determine that an earthquake shook a large swath of central Canada and north-eastern United States with an epicentre somewhere near Ottawa - Twitter put me into contact with real people down on the ground feeding raw human reaction into the global awareness...140 characters at a time.

After that, I went to Facebook and changed my status to marvel at Twitter's ability to provide real-time, ground-level updates on "what was going on" and had some conversation with a few Facebook friends there. And people "liked this".

Social media, microblogging, and blogging, all have their uses, and society is better for our ability, opportunity and access to be able to speak to issues, in an organized manner, and interact with both supporters and detractors, for productive discourse. This is where the critical difference between social media, microblogs and blogs should be recognized.

These forms are not the same

While people may incorrectly inter-use these various forms, there really are substantial differences among social sites such as Facebook, microblogging sites such as Twitter, and your garden variety blog to the degree I hardly understand how spelling it out is even necessary. Surely one cannot suggest a long-form analysis of the state of the economy or naturopathic methods of dealing with arthritis can be properly discussed "in 140 characters or less" or by changing my status.

Indeed, Facebook has elements that approximate both blogging and microblogging with it, and many recognize the Twitter approach as peeling away everything else from Facebook except the status line. Yes, there are edges that bleed into each other. But, they are not the same. A complementary usage (such as using a tweet to share a hypelink to a blog post), leveraging the strengths of both, is an obvious recognition that they are not synonymously interchangeable.

Blogging is evolving

Yes, some people feel blogging is more about "clipping" interesting finds on the internet over spewing narcissistic, self-indulgent babble to no one in particular. But, freedom says people can use tools and technology as it suits them, and the long-form has become the principle concept for today's independent blogger (as opposed to journalists of paper-based forms such as newspapers or magazines porting their efforts to the electronic space).

Here's an interesting treatment of the question at the Online Journalism Review entitled "Just what is a blog, anyway?" that uses language in its introduction eerily similar to that of this post's title (I did not copy it, it just seems the most apt title to describe the crux of the matter). It also quotes Jeff Jarvis, whom I've previously quoted on this blog as well (any discussion of contemporary issues in media will stumble across his name not infrequently, indeed). Yes, this OJR article is 5 years old - how much has blogging changed since 2005? Enough to know that, indeed, this is not a static entity. Like the human experience, blogging is rather fluid in its application, which makes it an excellent medium to complement other efforts to navigate the human experience in the element of the online space.

Am I late to the party?

Some may say so. I say "nah." Plenty of people recognize that things are really "just getting started" in the blogosphere. Having said that, I don't have enough ego to think that my blog will be "the life of the party" either. Ought Thoughts will just be one more conversation in one corner of one room of the party. It will appeal to some, not to others, definitely not to all. That's diversity, in all its splendor.  The OughtThought then, is that blogging makes an important contribution to a free society, and it should be celebrated for the platform it provides to the voice of the individual.

Nut Allergies, Part 2

Previously, I called for research into how to make peanuts less allergic. It appears it's happening.

A recent Toronto Star article entitled Scientists breeding less allergic peanutsdiscusses "breeding new strains of peanuts stripped of deadly allergens that could dramatically reduce the risk to millions of people." I would be among those millions.

It's about time. This could reduce direct costs to society in the form of health care, and indirect costs associated with work absenteeism and lost productivity. It could also open up more revenues for companies who sell products with nut ingredients, the article rightly recognizing nut allergies as a "market barrier."

But, is there a downside to "franken-peanuts"? Perhaps, but is anyone complaining about the size of giant strawberries lately? If we can tolerate genetic modification to turn what used to be a small berry into a multi-bite plum-sized fruit, hopefully there will be few side effects to peanuts that kill less people, provided these geneticists get this right, and I hope they do.

One problem I can readily appreciate is, how would I know if this restaurant or that dessert item includes the allergen-reduced nuts in their ingredients? The danger is that people might be lulled into a false sense of safety and eat something they might previously have avoided, trusting that the ingredients included the allergen-reduced nut, and finding much to their chagrin that the nuts used were reaction-causing.

I only hope, however, that whatever virtue is left in a free market would sort this out naturally; that demand would skyrocket for the allergen-reduced foodstuffs, and suppliers would align their supply accordingly, thus effectively eliminating the reaction-causing nuts from supply through sheer force of concern for profit.

A suit that just doesn't fit

Here's the headline/byline from the Globe and Mail - "Lawsuit could make designated drivers liable for intoxicated passengers: Woman, who leapt from moving car during domestic dispute, sues driver".

Inga Richardson was having a domestic dispute with her common-law spouse Joey Sanayhie one night after drinking, and she jumped out of the moving vehicle he was driving. Ms. Richardson's lawyers contend that Mr. Sanayhie was aware she had previously jumped from a moving boat when agitated and that, as such, he should have been more careful to restrain her before she jumped from the moving car.

I think this lawsuit is absurd.

Adults who drink are still adults

A person who operates a vehicle is responsible to ensure that minors are using functional restraint systems properly. Children who are not properly restrained are the responsibility of the operator of the vehicle. Adult passengers, however, are responsible for themselves and the proper use of seat belts themselves (at least, that's how it is here in Ontario). In the case of a person who was purchasing and consuming alcohol from a retail establishment, that person must be understood to have been an adult (since it is against the law to sell liquor to minors) and, as such would be responsible for their behaviour when they are passengers in someone else's vehicle.

Drunkenness is not an excuse

People who "drink and drive" are held responsible for damage they cause as a result of driving while intoxicated. In fact, driving while intoxicated is itself a crime. If these laws can be upheld, then we accept that a person who does something against the law while intoxicated is still accountable.

Applied to this case, the woman who jumped out of the car, regardless of the fact that she was not operating the vehicle, is still an adult responsible for her actions, even if she is in a state of inebriation when making her decisions - she cannot use her intoxicated state to escape her own responsibility for deciding to jump out of a moving vehicle.

The new status quo - drink responsibly

People who choose to get drunk make that decision to get drunk before they get drunk. Our laws make it clear that damages caused while drunk are not mitigated by being drunk - in fact they are exacerbated because of the stigma to prevent someone even thinking they might escape responsibility by appealing to their drunken state. So, for example, driving is not a crime. Driving while intoxicated is a crime, even if you don't commit any other crime while driving (you don't have to speed, or hit a fire hydrant or telephone pole, or run a red light while drunk - driving itself while drunk is the crime).

This is why the lingo is not "serve responsibly", or "chaperon responsibly", or "bartend responsibly", "be a pal responsibly". The onus sits squarely on the shoulders of the individual who decides to drink.

The bottom line is this: if you get drunk, you remain fully responsible for your actions.

Precedent would threaten the industry

Once this transfer of responsibility is upheld, what person would expose themselves to the risk of being held responsible for the actions of a drunken fool? If there are increasingly less people willing to take that risk, then there will be less support for people to drink; with less support for drinking, there'd be less drinking; with less drinking, there'd be less purchasing of alcoholic beverages - hold the phone...

The revenue stream

When you think about wine, and beer, and alcoholic beverages, there are many iconic brands and identities out there, as well as regions that have become very closely linked to their grape-growing or beer brewing. Whether it's Jack Daniels in some country bar; or James Bond's insistence that a proper martini is made with vodka and is shaken, not stirred; or the classic bottle of Bordeaux wine breathing on the table of a sumptuous spread or casually shared on a blanket with a baguette and some foie gras sitting under the Eiffel Tower... It may be surprising for some to realize that the number-one retailer of alcoholic beverages on planet earth is Ontario's very own LCBO, with sales in 2008 reaching almost $4.27 billion, dividends to the Ontario Provincial Government exceeding $1 billion that same year, and almost $1 billion in PST and GST going to the provincial and federal governments over the same period.

The LCBO is a cash cow for the government. If the social and ethical considerations weren't sufficient to squash this ridiculous suit, the threat to the governments' coffers should be.