There have been a few summaries about the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility Conference, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center and Shorenstein Center at Harvard, along with the American Library Association. Most of them focused on what the insiders have said– NYU Professor and conference presenter Jay Rosen even titled his summary “Big Wigs Confer.” I thought I’d take a separate angle, and look at what some of the little people said. This includes the little voices around the big table; the voices of the observers in the room, and even people on the Internet– bloggers and others who care about the future of ideas– who felt excluded from the conversaion in the first place. And I thought I’d do this using the framework of inclusiveness.There was not much substance to report on anyways: mostly journalists learning about some newfangled technology from the blogging evangelists. As Mr. Berkman himself told me, it was not academic, but “people sharing business ideas.” It was all rather tame in compared to the populist riot which had erupted on the conference blog. At the start of the conference, inside the oak paneling of the fifth floor of the Taubman Center Rebecca MacKinnon casually dismissed the rioters on the blog. Apparently they had gotten to the point of labelling the Berkman Center as “kitten-eating evil cyborgs” or somesuch, so we all enjoyed a good laugh at the reductio ad absurdum. But after the conference, when I felt a bit disappointed as to the whole proceedings, I began to seek out the critics on the blog. Maybe they had something to say. It was tough to glean much coherence coming out of the blog comments, but when engaged in email, the critics were all thoughtful and articulate. “I guess I’m a bit clearer now than I was on the blog” was a common refrain. According to the thinking, I should offer some sort of transparent disclosure about who I am: I’m not affiliated with Harvard; I work as a software engineer in Cambridge. Also, I’m a liberal white male Jewish American, hardly a minority in the field of media or media studies. Then again, maybe that’s why I should write about this. But there’s more important disclosures to make. I’ve never thought about diversity issues much in my writings. I didn’t go to the conference expecting to write about this. I didn’t take many notes on it. I did not honor my observer status, and spent too much time thinking about how to get a word in to the discussion. I can’t even say for certain that the paneling was oak, but it was a dark brown wood. I do remember the conversations, I have checked the transcripts, and was relaxed enough during the conference because I knew this subject pretty well.

Approaches

Let’s take a moment to appreciate the Berkman Center . Most of their conferences have low entry fees– free, in fact. This one had a scarcity of seats available, so the entrance fee for the uninvited folk, turned out to be, at least for me, to give a reason and to ask nicely. But if you couldn’t get in, you could still follow along the conference blog, webcast and the conversation in IRC (Internet relay chat). Questions from the IRC were brought into the conference. You’d be hard pressed to find a government body in America which is as open as this. As the technology becomes more available, such a model should be expanded. (The participants list generally included people from the spheres of academia, media, blogging; including librarians, social scientists, journalists, producers, software developers, foundation representatives, consultants– ed.) Nonetheless, there were challenges to the inclusiveness due to the concentration of voices at the conference. I suppose that these can be generalized for any small group:

1. Will we be able to engage a diversity of voices and perspectives?
2. Will we avoid the mild bigotry that can occur when few are present to speak up for an under-represented group?
3. Will the legitimacy of the efforts be questioned because we weren’t inclusive enough?

Well, in the end, we didn’t have to worry #3. John Palfrey’s summary concluded “We’re certainly a long way from a shared set of principles, or a code of ethics, or even an understanding of how they could come about,” and one of the critics of the exclusiveness. Jeneane Sessum, breathed a sigh of relief at that conclusion. So we’ll restrict our focus to the first two points.

Assumptions

Analyzing this, there’s a few of assumptions we’ll need to make: First, that the conference was meant to affect only the people that wanted to be affected by it. That is, bloggers who write for a more public interest, and thus want to reach new readers, would care about credibility; those who write for a more private interest would not. Second, that functional proxies may be more important to diversity than identity proxies. A black woman may not be expected to able to speak for all black women, but a librarian who speaks for library users should be seen as an appropriate representative– for that is her job. Third, while there are many strands diversity to aim for, some of which are more critical than others for given situation. Which means that some are less critical. Nonetheless, it is the impulse of liberalism that inspires members of certain minority groups not currently repressed to speak up for minorities that currently are. As Exodus 22:21 instructs, “A stranger shalt thou not wrong, neither shalt thou oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (JPS Translation)

The Axes of Exclusiveness

I have thought of nine axes of inclusiveness/exclusiveness. Forgive the term, as I am under-informed in the proper nomenclature. I had to think a bit to come up with the terminology, so I picked the categories that were suggested by many on the Internet. And I thought a little more, remembering the phrase “race, color, creed, or national origin,” which is at the core of the U.S.’s anti-discrimination statutes. As best as I can find, the phrase was first used legally in the text of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which prohibited in discrimination along those lines in the defense industry in 1941. What does creed really mean, I wondered? Could it have a similar root as credibility? I checked the O.E.D., and found out that “creed” shares the same root as credo, or a personal set of beliefs. “Credibility,” it appears, shares a direct root with credentials, both the Latin credere, which is to believe. Creed describes what we believe, while credibility describes what others believe of us, often through our credentials. Credentials are most useful to mind in an gathering of academics and non-academics.

Race, National Origin, First Language, Religion

“How many bloggers of color did you invite? How many reporters/journalists of color? I’m making assumptions here–I better be careful–like I’m always so careful. It wouldn’t be ethical to be careless. Yes, so, I just want to know.” — Jeneane Sessum There was not much diversity on the first three counts. But I don’t think this was central to the discussion, as it was, for say, the last Berkman conference on “Voting, Bits & Bytes”. (This had directly addressed politics, and also hosted a few hundred people. — ed.) After the conference I followed up with Jeneane, and she stuck by her point: “That’s what’s wrong. That the exclusion didn’t affect the discussion.” I just don’t see it. Nonetheless, she did refer me to Shelley Powers, who penned a deeply-informed piece around this point:

it’s not surprising, though perhaps is ironic, to see that there is actually better representation of women and blacks and other racial minorities in the professional journalist circles than there is in the so-called ‘citizen journalistic’ ranks of weblogging, because there is no economic or social incentive for the citizen journalists to look outside of their ranks.

There was also testimony brought in from non-Americans. Hoder (the Toronto-based “Iranian blogger”), contributed comments via IRC. Ethan Zuckerman relayed Hoder’s comments to the group, and also brought up Hoder’s comments to the previous Berkman conference on the role of blogs in Iran. They are in fact much more central to Iranian information culture, as a legitimate counterweight against state-controlled media. Another presentation from the previous conference was brought up the Oh My News Internet publication in South Korea (which is written by 25 reporters, 10 editors, and 33,000 citizen-journalists. — ed. learn more from MSNBC) Getting religious diversity is obviously more tricky, as that’s something that isn’t commonly asked or disclosed. Certainly having some religiously-minded folk of any stripe is helpful for a discussion about ethics. Conservative pundit-turned-blogger Hugh Hewitt posted numerous times complaining about the lack of “faith-based,” or as he calls them, “Godbloggers.” In one such post, he wrote: “But like almost every member of the blogger conference convening today at Harvard to discuss blogging ethics and related issues, Jeff [Jarvis] seems to carry contempt for faith based conservatives in his laptap.” Jarvis made an effort to point out during the session that he was a church-going Protestant (though didn’t answer any of Hewitt’s specific charges. — ed.). And somebody else made an effort to get copies of Hewitt’s latest book, Blog, into the conference (Frank Paynter wonders how — and the best answer is that it was John Hinderaker’s effort — ed.). And there was one synagogue-going Jew, even going to synagogue instead of the Saturday morning session. That would be me, and granted, this was a last-minute decision. But a fully Sabbath-observing Jew would have left at around 4pm on Friday, and may have elected to go to a quick morning service on Saturday before returning to the conference, if at all. In the end, ethics were not deeply discussed in a religious context. Christopher Lydon made a point about the blogs having “God-ly qualities: omnipotent, all-knowing, invisible, accessible to each and everyone of us.” This did not seem to offend anyone.

Gender

Only a quarter of the participants were women. But it was even more lopsided when you consider those who of the dozen or so dominant voices (more on that in the section), only one was a woman: Berkman fellow Rebecca MacKinnon. One of the leaders of the four sessions was a woman, Professor Judath Donath of MIT. This is especially a sensitve issue, in light of the comments and subequent apology by the President of Harvard, Larry Summers about the need for more woman in the science. I will try my best. Now one may be a feminist in the sense that they want more women to participate, or one may accept the theories of the innate cognitive differences between men and woman, or one may accept both (as I do), and in all cases the message is the same: women’s voices are important to conversations, especially in the science of human behavior. Thankfully, the women’s voices were very key in challenging some of the assertions that were floating around.

• Jill Abramson of the New York Times steadfastly defended her paper against the charges that her paper’s reporting in Baghdad was ineffectual. “to sustain a [news office] in Baghdad, I wonder if anyone here knows what that would cost?”