Blogs-A-Million

From the moment we arrive on earth, we are taught that with freedom comes responsibility, a simple truth we carry around throughout our lives. We sometimes forget these simple truths and don’t consider what we’re doing, as we can see from the following maxim: “there are bloggers out there who will do practically anything—start rumors, tell lies, pick fights, create fake personas, and post embarrassing videos—to get noticed and linked to.” (Blogs by Sarah Boxer) Our hungry egos push us to make some pretty silly decisions for the sake of stimulating our fame, in this case to be recognized as an important blogger. It is our individual responsibility to communicate the truth always and try to keep squeaky clean our own part of the web from these lies that become influential information in other people’s minds. The problem is as big as the web is, and it expands as fast as a user takes a couple of simple steps to create an account, which will transmit information all over the globe. “Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with about 15 million of them active.” (Blogs by Sarah Boxer) We must admit the cultural, political, ideological and social exchange these blogs manage must be enormous. Due to the accessibility of the internet it is easier to be part of this blog world which could lead to the destruction of a person’s reputation, character, emotions and individual traits. These blogs can effect whole nations and groups of people by posting devious information about what really is going on politically, economically, religiously and socially. You can only imagine what could happen when civil unrest or a war is taking place.

Laws that defend the truth on the web are still to be created and enforced, and it is probably going to be impossible to control all countries which have access to blogging. The whole idea of a web police imposing their brand of web ethics is absolutely daunting. It would have to be universally decided and accepted by some organization like the United Nations. Copyright is just one of the main problems, since there is almost an absolute liberty (I say so due to the low but existent control of the domain the blog is registered to) it is very possible to take credit for another’s work. “Books fret over copyright and libel. Blogs grab whatever they want with impunity—news, gossip, pictures, videos. Making a book out of bloggy material, if it could be done at all, would kill it, wouldn't it?” (Blogs by Sarah Boxer) The possibility blogs give an author are unimaginable in a book. As I think of this, I don’t even believe there could be any control over the material in blogs, even with the strictest of rules (unless a major reset in the www would happen).

The connections between blogs run down the stream to the original source, which in many cases won’t even be credited for the information. Links make this possible with a click instead of the running down through pages to search for the correct footnote. “Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references—doesn't sit happily in a book.” (Blogs by Sarah Boxer) Through links, people can get just the information they want (and even a lot that they aren’t aware they acquired), without an open encyclopedia. It is necessary for all who use the web to reflect on the power of blogging and to try to control our own little thread of it, in order for it to be a constructive tool, a very nourishing and true source of varied information. We are posed with a fascinating challenge: how to keep the internet free, creative, open, tolerant, growing and available to all, yet at the same time honest, healthy and clean. To make this happen we must each start with ourselves and blog about this amazing problem so the web itself finds and activates solutions.