[17 October 2003] a common conscience
Often when I act conscientiously I think of Joke R. The capital R being the first letter of her last name is added to avoid any misunderstanding among my readers, between a Dutch first name and the MS Word synonym (frankly that’s all I use it for: spelling and synonyms) for ‘gag’, or ‘prank’, or ‘witticism’. My conscience is no joke to me. Neither does it speak too loud, thus allowing for room to move around my deep loves and deep frustrations. If these come to the surface outside their dedicated articulation in my art and public writing, they may well be pushed there by that conscience. My thoughts go to her, as in a reflex. Sometimes I understand this reflex as an intuition to contact her. She may pick up the phone, even halfway the machine’s message, if her conscience or intuition takes over. She may call back later, or mail.
After I wrote this letter this morning, sent away as an email, I wondered what has become of correspondence, as a person-to-person highly personal, private contact, for which the ‘confidentiality of the mail’ was invented. Would it be ridiculous to speak off a confidentiality of the weblog? Can’t we conceive of a complex confidentiality, which for example makes one decide not to link to one or another document.
What are the ethics of weblog publishing? I don't mean the personal ethics of the author, but a confidentiality native to the format. Can there be? Would it follow an ethic of other public utterances, and if so, how would these translate?
Why not, how very apt unethically, ‘let the Internet decide’... “weblog ethics” googles 1,120 hits, against a breathtaking 12,100,000 for ‘weblog’ — it is certainly not on every blogger’s mind — here’s one vision in who else’s but Rebecca's Pocket. I'll use some time to scan some of the other hits.
Giving it more thought, the weblog’s native confidentiality is precisely in its hesitation between the private and the public, protecting neither one of these spheres against the other, obviously without simply mixing them irrespective of their proper qualities.
Disclaimer. For those believers who claim such a thing as a publication can have no native ethics, or confidentiality, let me add precision here: it is exactly about what sort of confidentiality a certain utterance might invite in who utters. Like Joke invites my conscience.
(Later confidentiality). Have you forgotten, that once we were brought here, we were robbed of our name, robbed of our language, we lost our religion, our culture, our gods... and many of us by the way we act, we even lost our mind.
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local parenting ahead
Later today I pick up R+r from school to visit the doctor for R’s tuberculosis shots. I have to wriggle them from the rugby hour. Too bad. Returning home we try to place an ad for their N64 on marktplaats.nl. We don't receive the confirmation email and don't see the ad. They're excited about selling. We start at €99, the new price for a new Gamecube. Lots of N64s are on offer. Theirs is quite complete so hopefully competitive. Every euro over the 80 that we lent them to buy a Platinum Zelda Wind Waker GC, just before the price dropped on the straight model, flows back to them. Next item on their wishlist is Mario Kart, released two days ago for da kube.
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