Professional & Ethics in Blogging, Round 2

It’s been a few weeks since my Book Blogger Convention talk on professionalism and ethics for book bloggers, but I am still seeing new responses—earlier today, I found a particularly thoughtful critique by Jessica, a philosophy professor specializing in ethics that zeroed in on a few areas where, in reviewing the video, I recognized a need to tighten up my presentation, as well as a few spots that I had missed. I’m not going to touch on all of them in this post, I suspect, but I did want to get some thoughts down.

Jessica notes that the stylistic lines between “professional” literary critics and “unprofessional” book bloggers are not clear-cut; bloggers often engage in “objectivity-enhancing practices” such as not reviewing friends’ books, for example, and mainstream literary criticism is, ultimately, subjective. It reminded me of a point that came up in an interview I did a few years back about the philosophy of wine: “On the one hand, we insist that it’s all subjective,” I wrote after my conversation with Barry Smith. “But, if so, what’s the point of any wine criticism, let alone the attempt to establish standard rankings? Wouldn’t complete subjectivity reduce criticism to autobiography? (I immediately think of useful parallels that might be drawn to literary criticism.)”

That’s not a question that can be resolved very easily; I only want to point out for now that if the line of demarcation between the professional and unprofessional “writing about books” were essentially stylistic, it might also be arbitrary, with attempts by professionals to suppress the proliferation of “unprofessional” writing, or at the very least its influence, stemming from highly vested self-interests—which circles back to my point that “professionals” set up the standard of what is real/valid in order to validate their own reality and deny power to others.

From there, Jessica observes that, in addressing the BookBloggerCon audience as “unprofessional” in the traditional sense of the term (though I would quickly work to lay out an alternative form of “professionalism” focused on excellence rather than financial compensation), I was inadvertently negating the very real economic concerns of many audience members, some of whom were attempting to make money by writing or blogging. She also brought up a history of “descriptions of the public sphere that describe anything women do as non-public, non-commercial, [or] non-political,” which—considering the overwhelming presence of women in the audience—risks putting any comments about “unprofessionalism” and book blogging in an unfavorable light.

From my entire presentation, however, I hope it’s clear that I celebrate the literary blogosphere not merely as an alternative public sphere but as such a compelling alternative that the mainstream has already begun to assimilate it, as evidenced by the presence of a book blog in the online portfolio of several major American newspapers and magazines. If those in power are attempting to appropriate the form of book blogging while still maintaining that other book bloggers aren’t up to their standard, I ask another question: Is there a different, more useful standard book bloggers might use in evaluating themselves?

(Of course, co-optive appropriation is something we could talk about for ages; Lizzie Skurnick makes some brilliant points on this topic.)

Later, Jessica catches one of the presentation’s significant shortcomings, in that I really could improve upon the transition from discussing that standard of excellence to discussing the ethical issues that can come up in blogging; in particular, she correctly observes that something I only touched on—the application of ethical judgment to the pursuit of that standard of excellence—could have been made more explicit; I will work to do so the next time I speak on this subject. I’ll also try to be clearer on the issue of the trust a reader places in a text or, more precisely, in the creator of that text, and the ways in which I think we actually want to read certain types of writing from a position of trust rather than a position of skepticism.

(I confess, however, that I find the meta-ethical aspects of the discussion useful, and even somewhat enjoyable, in that I wanted to underscore that ethics can be considered in terms of questions rather than answers. Could I elaborate better examples from my experience running Beatrice? Perhaps. But I’d want to find a way to do that and still emphasize the ability of each member of that audience to ask ethical questions and come to reasonable conclusions that may or may not coincide with historical precedent.)

There’s a lot more I could say here, and I’m sure I’ll come back to this topic again. I’m very grateful to have been prompted to think about it tonight by Jessica’s response.

19 June 2010 | uncategorized |