Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Bad Behavior about Bad Behavior

If I am to believe Reuters, then Tim O'Reilly's "code of conduct" draft has provided an incentive for a growing amount of bad posting behavior in the blogosphere. The rest of the report basically records O'Reilly's disappointment, as well as that of Jimmy Wales. Since I tend to believe that reasoned criticism should not be taken for bad behavior, I would like to think that I am not part of this particular trend. However, lest I be accused of either contributing to or fomenting bad behavior, I probably ought to come clean and reproduce what I feel was my most emotional outburst, submitted as a comment to Truthdig:

The real problem behind this story is that cyberspace, particularly the blogosphere, is a socio-technical phenomenon. There is no faulting folks like O’Reilly and Wales in matters of technical competence; but, when it comes to social matters, it seems as if their grasp of the situation runs the gamut from the woefully incompetent to the hopelessly naive.

Yes, this may have been extreme language; but it is also a reflection on the role that these two particular individuals have had in shaping the world that the Internet has made. Actually, my guess is that O'Reilly are in the same boat. Neither his "code of conduct" nor my own call for a discussion of governance is cyberspace is likely to get anywhere; but I have lived through enough disappointments to know better than to beat my breast over this one!

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