Greg says, in reference to Don Park's post "There's editing posts and then there's what I call De-publishing.
De-publishing is when an author deletes or substantively changes a post without any sort of retraction or notice that the change has taken place. Note that I'm talking about *substantive* changes -- not fixing grammer or spelling or text formatting, but changes that affect the meaning or impact of the post.
Winer regularly writes something inflammatory and then later tries to 'erase' it from existence by de-publishing it. I disapprove of that because with publishing should come accountability.
Mark Pilgrim is using Winer's RSS feeds to track the 'virtual paper trail' to reveal the kind of de-publishing that takes place on Scripting News.
I find de-publishing far more unethical and detrimental to the blogosphere (especially when it comes from such a prominent blogger as Winer) than what Mark Pilgrim is doing."
That is simply nonsense. I do not have a responsibility to publish in any way whatsoever. I reserve the right to depublish, publish, edit, stand on my head, whatever in the hell I wish to do with my words. This entire issue is subsumed under the term "reputation." In spite of Dave's proclivities he is considered a reasonably reputable person by enough folks to make him a widely read authority.
To reiterate: I have no obligation to this blogosphere to which you speak. And it has no authority over me. If I make a violation of de-publishing is someone going to take my license?
This is just appalling. I can see next week there will be advocates for an authority to regulate editing & depublishing among bloggers. The Blogosphere Ethical Editing Consortium [BLEEC] seems to fit. What a bunch of hooey. If you feel that Dave is not reputable because of what you see has a "depublishing problem" then don't read his words.
It seems fairly obvious to me that both Dave and Mark are very astute fellows with pretty large egos. Dave comes out ahead in my book simply because he's several decades older than Mark and has had some of his more annoying arrogances filed down by reality and experience.
Although it is obviously mean spirited and in keeping with Mark's maturity level the exercise is rather interesting in what it points to. I'd like to see this system offered as a service. I'd like to have such a change feed of my own words and I'd like to be able to keep such change feeds on whatever source I subscribe to. It would be great to see how stories get edited from sources like The New York Times, BBC and other journalism touchstones as well as bloggers I read daily on the net. I can even see an editing quotient derived from such a system. Blogger X edits an average of 1.2 words per 100 or something like that. If such quotients were publicly trackable it may prove to be very interesting.
I totally agree. Were Dave Winer a CNN, or some other news organization I might think differently, but he isn't. He's just a guy, and it's his web site, and he can do with it whatever he pleases. If his blog were a subscription service that I had to pay for, I might expect a higher level of accountability. But it's not, so I don't.
Posted by: Michael Ditto | July 11, 2003 at 08:14 PM
Personal accountability for public actions is the foundation of civilized society. If you want to do away with that, you'll have to come up with a better argument than "You're Not The Boss Of Me".
Posted by: jjg | July 13, 2003 at 12:17 PM
Actually I think you are confusing two things: public actions & the narrator.
The first question to be asked of any text is can this narrator be trusted. The assumption that anything posted on a blog is to be trusted, and subject to de-publishing, is simply wrong. It is one thing to say that Dave Winer is wrong in de-publishing his remarks, and Mark did a splendid job of showing this (I assume as all I saw were some small incremental edits in word placement and syntax), but it is quite another to advocate some moral dimension to de-publishing in general. Which is how I read Greg's comments.
I write fiction, non-fiction, and opinion interspersed with no markers, and a great deal of obfuscation all the time. I edit everything constantly. I do not subscribe to the notion that first version best version. I disagree with Miss Blood's assertions as well. I am writing a long piece which some may call a blog. It will be done when I have finished, I expect it will be some years from now, and it is constantly being re-written. It is simply inappropriate for anyone, outside of each writer themselves, to decide there is or is not a moral dimension to that editing process.
Now granted that Dave may very well be a villain here. I have no problem with that. But Greg's assertion seems to be that since Mr. Winer may engage in this type of behavior to hurt others that it is emblematic of "de-publishing." De-publishing exists in all media and has as long as we have had any type of media at all, scrolls, books, paintings in caves.
As I said all of this is subsumed under reputation.
And I stand by what I said, we do not all agree on what constitutes writing in a public space. I do not agree with the assertion that one must not de-publish. I certainly would agree with the assertion that Dave Winer does it very poorly.
Posted by: filchyboy | July 13, 2003 at 01:44 PM
Words do not exist in a vacuum. Words are actions; once made public and read, they can have impact. If we write something hurtful, the hurt doesn't evaporate because we erase the words. Spread false information, and incorrect perceptions aren't corrected by covering up our falsehood.
We don't have a "responsibility to publish" in a particular way . . . at least not any more than you have a responsibility to behave like a decent, accountable person in any other aspect of your life.
However, whether we like it or not, we ARE accountable for what we publish. You are free to choose to not accept that accountability, but don't be surprised if your community still holds you accountable anyway.
This is what happened with Dave Winer. Note, please, that we're not talking about fixing punctuation or revising a short story. Winer regularly posts inflammatory, insulting comments, then erases and denies them hours later after it becomes apparent to him he will catch flack. Ad hominem attacks are qualitatively different. Can he do that? Sure, he obviously has. Should he do that? I'd argue that what he does is cowardly, unethical, and irresponsible. So, no, I don't think he should do that because I generally expect people to not behave cowardly, unethically, or irresponsibly.
Dave chose to not be accountable for his words. People call him on it all the time, but Mark Pilgrim called him on it big time. Pilgrim used technology to build a monitoring system that keeps closer track on Winer's public edits than any single person could. It's the community holding him accountable, since he refuses to do so himself.
I don't agree that reputation is the equivalent. Reputation is a difficult standard to base decisions on when all of the information isn't available. When you whitewash your egregious public behavior away, what can someone base their estimation of your reputation on? The whitewashed result? Is that a useful basis for a reader to make a determination?
Reputation is established by consistency (or inconsistency) of actions. The Winer Watcher application provides an improved view into publicly available information, so people can make more informed judgments about Winer's reputation.
Posted by: Greg | July 14, 2003 at 12:44 PM
I'm not disagreeing with you about Winer. I am simply disagreeing with the notion the de-publishing is somehow new and intrisic to web publishing or that a priori there is something wrong with it.
Posted by: filchyboy | July 14, 2003 at 02:27 PM
"De-publishing" isn't possible in print media, because once the physical printed page has been distributed, it's unwieldy to "recall" or "erase" that printed page. Not so online.
Likewise, de-publishing is only possible for an individual if the individual controls both the authoring and the publishing mechanism. A weblogger can pull back their own texts, but a reporter writing for an online publication would typically have to go through an editor, a role that (ideally) injects accountability into the process, both before and after publication. Although, we know that's far from perfect.
So I would argue, at least with respect to the written word, that it's a decision-making process fairly unique to the online environment.
Of course, one could draw some parallels with live, unrecorded performances or conversations, where one can easily deny or "take back" what was spoken, precisely because of the lack of record.
Finally, I believe that responsible, ethical people assume accountability for their words and actions. You can disagree with that belief, if you so choose. Of course, there's also a scale of impact -- covering up a typo is qualitatively different than covering up slander, and you can't equate the two.
However, I don't believe you can negate the impact of covering up or "de-publishing" inflammatory comments by saying "Oh, it's all subsumed under reputation."
Posted by: Greg | July 14, 2003 at 06:20 PM
Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct, nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record.
George Orwell
1984
Posted by: filchyboy | July 14, 2003 at 11:06 PM
??? Absent context, filch, I can't tell whether the intent of your quote is to agree with me or to attempt to paint me in an Orwellian light. Clarification?
Posted by: Greg | July 15, 2003 at 08:17 AM