Do You Ever Think about Who Reads What You Write on Your Blog?
by
on December 21, 2008,
When I think about blogging, micro-blogging and social networking as well I often feel that people are getting way over-exposed looking like real flashers more than willing to share everything we can with the world - even the things that we obviously should not share in any case at all. We eagerly share our real-life world with total strangers who we have never seen beyond our virtual encounters.
Of course some people are more or less conscious in things like privacy and distinguishing our real friends from our virtual ones but all in all it does not change a thing: we are still way too much willing to share, quite often without thinking about who we share with at all.
The thing is that I recently had a peculiar thought: I don’t know the vast majority of my readers here at all and can hardly imagine who thousands of people brought here from social voting and bookmarking sites are at all. I am often appalled when I see some of the comments these people leave here - some hateful, others racist and so on. Yet I continue to talk to these people same as I talk to a few of my good friends who also read this blog - sharing the thoughts and opinions that I know I will be criticized for, simply because I know that people prefer to see a person behind blog posts or newspaper articles in these over-social days of exuberant sharing of everything with everyone willing to answer.
Sure, I do know some of the readers of this blog - mainly those who care to leave a comment and share their thoughts on the topics I cover here and those who choose to talk with me in places like Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook. I know where some of my readers live and what they do for a living, I know how many children they have and where they go on vacations.
And certainly when you know so many things about someone you have never met in real life, you can certainly think of this person as a rather close virtual friend. But these people are certainly not numerous - I only have a couple of dozens of people like this, hardly more. And even the most widely-read bloggers will hardly be able to build numerous close relationships with hundreds and thousands of their readers, I think.
But these friends are a very small part of the entire audience of the people who read Profy and sometimes I am more than curious thinking about who may drop here once upon a time for some reason - like tracking mentions of his or her name using Google Alerts maybe. But the vast majority of the readers will never leave comments or otherwise demonstrate their presence here. You would not expect Sergey Brin to retweet favorable blog posts about Google, right? So these people stay behind the curtain and while no one knows they are here, they can perfectly well be here and have their thoughts on what we say - and they can take our thoughts very personal as well.
So I have a question: would we write otherwise if we knew these people we criticize are actually here and reading? You know, I have a feeling that all the bloggers who trashed Jerry Yang over his politics with Yahoo as the corporation’s CEO would never dare to say anything remotely close to him if they had an occasion to meet in person. What’s more, I suspect that many would be more than happy to shake hands with one of Yahoo co-founders - no matter what they publicly speak in their blog posts about the recent years of the company.
I mean, there’s a big difference between what you say when you know the person concerned is listening - be it in the same room or by reading your column in a newspaper maybe - and what you say about the same person when you somehow feel he will never read it. And I think this also explains why we rarely see negative reviews of startups or ideas with well-known community members behind them.
Sure, bloggers will sometimes criticize certain events or write negative reviews of startups - knowing perfectly well that the people behind these events, ideas or companies will rush to our posts to argue, complaint and try to prove that this criticism is biased and has nothing to do with reality. But this criticism is rarely targeted against people you converse with on a daily basis in places like Twitter.
I myself sometimes face situations when I’d really want to criticize something but decide against it and keep silent about it for one simple reason: I know that these particular words will offend someone in my close community who I have no reasons to offend and don’t want to offend at all. Hence it is no surprise that startups often get more favorable reviews and bloggers often keep their negative opinions to themselves - keeping silence instead of reviewing the product or service they dislike - simply not to offend the person behind this product.
Rare examples are here but they are definitely rare. The recent one was with Allen Stern speaking his honest opinion aloud about Socialmedian, a service that allows people to clip content from around the web and start a discussion around this content right on the Socialmedian website. Allen argued that this model violates rights of web content producers as Socialmedian does not encourage people to visit the places where the content was originally published and in many cases allow users to consume content completely on Socialmedian without bothering to visit its initial producers. It is no wonder Allen’s post resulted in a very animated discussion with Socialmedian founder and the service user on Allen’s post, on FriendFeed and on Socialmedian submission of the post as well. And judging by all the comments Allen received on the post I have to say that it takes a lot of courage for a blogger to read something like this openly criticizing a service that has a lot for loyal followers - for whatever reason it may be. So it is no wonder we rarely see such things published at all.
Contrary, there are companies like Microsoft or Yahoo that we are always willing to criticize for every single wrongdoing and the smallest mistake - and we never think about these companies personally so we have nothing to stop us from criticizing these particular “impersonal” companies. Of course it is not difficult to trash a product or a service you dislike when the product does not have any personality behind it. I am sometimes embarrassed to read some of the things bloggers tell about this or that action of a large corporation for too harsh criticism that is on the verge of being uncivil at all.
So I had a thought: what if our blogs are frequented by CEOs of Google or Yahoo and they are sometimes personally offended by our harsh words? Would we change our minds and tones and write in a milder manner - to state the point but not to make it personal? Or at the very least try to stay civil - like when you are reading the same post aloud to a large audience at a conference, where there are dozens of representatives of the company you are trashing. Will you really choose a tone that will be enough to make sure everyone will understand your negative thoughts but still you will avoid offending someone at the same time.
So the major question that should actually matter here is: should a reporter or a blogger stay civil behaving like he would have behaved in real life when meeting the same person or sticking to his journalist integrity sharing what he actually thinks with the world - even if some people in this world will be offended. Honestly, I have a feeling that it is not all that easy to maintain that integrity and never to choose silence over criticism for a blogger covering events in more or less closed community - like the one we have in the web 2.0 industry. So no matter how much some bloggers try to behave like real trained journalists, it is still obvious that they are often very opinionated due to the nature of the community and the people they have lunch with today - and refrain from criticizing tomorrow.
