The Federal Trade Commision announced yesterday that they are now regulating some specific types of speech in the blogging world. Specifically, they are going to try to force bloggers to divulge freebies and endorsements from products they promote on their blogs. The FTC says they're going to levy up to $11,000 per violation, and on a blog there could theoretically be several violations per post. So what's really at stake here?
I've referenced Jeff Jarvis on this blog before, and I still think he has some important ideas on language and business communication. However, he states in a recent post, that he's very, very opposed to the new FTC regs, and I'm not exactly sure why. Well, I mean understand his argument; I'm just not sure I agree. He points to horrendous semi-spam sites like Pay Per Post and says that they are one big target of the new regs.
Sidebar: Pay Per Post (PPP) connects advertisers and bloggers by subject matter. For instance, some company sells rhetoric textbooks, and they want to advertise those books. They find out through PPP that I've got a blog that talks about, among other things, rhetoric. They offer to give me copies of their books, and even to pay me through PPP, to blog about how great their books are. I've got an established blog, a built-in group of readers, and a history of being trustworthy.
I think Jarvis is right that one of PPP's real goals is to cheat Google's search process. Furthermore, I agree with him (and plenty of others), on the princpal of language policing, who are initially against FTC regulation in this way.
However, I think there's another reason, rooted in our assumptions of language, that the FTC should target not only PPP but also other blogs that endorse products without full disclosure. And really, the issue of disclosure seems to be the FTC's main focus: you want to endorse some product on your blog because the producer paid you? No problem; just be transparent. Admit that payola to your readers, thus implying the possibility of bias. However, there is an over-arching issue here, from a rhetoric standpoint, wrapped up in how/why readers trust blogs (and language in general), and it points to two terrible attitudes a reader can have: full-on trust or full-on relativism.
Full-on trust: You believe everything that you read, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff. You take nothing with, as they say, a grain of salt. you never demand evidence in support of truth. You're slowly bled dry by people who realize that, if asked, you will give them money in exchange for a product or service.
Full-on relativism: You essentially trust nothing because you believe that everyone's opinion is right in their own special, little way, but nobody's opinion is as right as yours. You don't accept evidence, even when it's incontrovertible, in support of truth. Your favorite things to say include a dismissive "Whatever" and "Thas just, like, your opinion." You never really engage any academic or intellectual pursuit or seek any new knowledge, and your brain stays the same size it is now.
Or, we can realize a few things about humans and language use. First, it turns out that humans have opinions. Put another way, many philosophers argue that there is no such thing as objective information. Subjective information can still be useful, though, when it's supported by good evidence (logos). Secondly, Jarvis argues that the Internet is not a medium. He says that "it’s a place where people talk. Most people who blog, as Pew found in a survey a few years ago, don’t think they are doing anything remotely connected to journalism." I like Pew's claims about blogs and journalism, but I think that Jarvis is wrong. As I've argued before, blogs represent a special hybridized delivery system for meaning. By definition, that kind of delivery system is a medium. The material of that medium is language. The language of blogs comes from humans. Humans have opinions. The circle is complete.
Seriously though, the rhetoric skills we work on, especially our critical reading skills, create in our brains a better ability to search language for meaning. However, the percentage of readers who are overly trusting or overly relativistic seems to be huge and growing, from my perspective. If that's the case, what's the harm in FTC regulation of language? A compromise to our First Amendment right of free speech? News flash: those rights are already compromised. There are lots of things people aren't allowed to say (or show), and those limitations exist in part because of how readers/audiences interpret meaning (or fail to).
Readers tend to both trust and dismiss blogs by default (there's part of that hybridity in action). When we read something on a blog, I think we either assume that it comes from a trustworthy, unbiased source (often because it's in-line with our own opinions), or we dismiss it because, well, any crackpot can put anything on the web (or, more truthfully, because it is not in line with our opinions). Why do we trust or distrust these sources? Because blogs have some kind of punk-rock, DIY, outside-of-the-mainstream-media ethos?
No, no, no, I warn you. Our discerning eyes must depend not merely on ethos, but also on logos and the occasional smattering of pathos. If bloggers are paid to endorse a product, they should be compelled to admit that inforamtion. However, if we are going to read blogs, we should compel ourselves to use our critical reading skills to discern merit and truth. If we can't (or don't want to) compel ourselves in that way, maybe we shouldn't be reading.
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