FTC now regulating blogs? Relax, civilization won't end.

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.

A new way to read? (This could save you textbook money!)

Allow me to make an analogy:


Remember the original Nintendo GameBoy? Well, no. You probably don't. Though it threatens to date me even further, I'll admit that I do. I got one not long after they came out, and it was awesome. I played it so much, I used to see Tetris blocks on the sides of buildings, on cars driving by, and even when I closed my eyes. Then, other hand-held game systems started to come out; they had cool new features, better games and (gasp) color screens. There was the Atari Lynx; Sega had the Game Gear, etc. (I'm overlooking the fact that all of those systems - and most of their parent companies - have gone the way of the dinosaurs, while Nintendo is still going strong. It's my analogy, and I'm going somewhere with it.) Fast forward to systems like the PSP and DS with gorgeous screens, WiFi, etc, and suddenly that old GameBoy seems like a relic, an ancient joke that can't stand up to the scrutiny of history.






Think, too, about the original cell phones. Not the Korean-war-era-looking giant bag phones, but early cell phones. They did just what their name implied, and little more. Now, of course, our cell phones do a mind-blowing array of things and have more computing power than NASA's early computers. And, of course, there's the top of the ivory pedastal: the iPhone, which does everything and makes it look good.


Now, to the point. Apple is coming out with a new tablet (think computer with no keyboard) that, I think , has the potential to revolutionize portable reading devices in the same way that the iPhone revolutionized cell-phones. According to a post on Gizmodo, One of the markets Apple is setting their sites on is the textbook market.

Imagine buying this device, with its gorgeous screen, WiFi capabilities that let you (make you want to) use it everywhere for everything, AND you have all of your textbooks for classes on it, plus interactive class-supplements, blogs, discussion boards, etc. According to the article, McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press are already trying to get deals with Apple. How many of their big, expensive books do you currently own? How much money would you save if you could buy less expensive e-versions of those books?


Compared to a device like amazon's Kindle, even the Kindle 2 or the supersized Kindle 2 (both from Ars Technica), I don't see there being much competition. Like the old-school Gameboy (and perhaps the Model T), the Kindle can represent any color you want, as long as it's a shade of black. It sort of has a touch screen, but Apple has clearly demonstrated fire superiority in that arena.


Could be that Apple new business model has one goal: shift paradigms.

Online rhetoric in a public or private context?

As we begin to think about our blog assignments, I'm interested in how "public" we think they are. Some blogs end up being essentially personal diaries. Not the blogs for this class, though; they're research-driven and subject-matter-focussed. Right?!

Much to the chagrin of people who have been fired because of online comments (example after example...), what we put online is typically considered public. Most recently, The Washington Post issued a set of social-media guidelines for its journalists after a reporter let slip on his Twitter account that he has opinions about things. Read more about it at TechCrunch.

NY Times contributor Randall Stross claimed, in an article from a few years ago (how long is that in social-media-years?), that private and public spheres must not be allowed to overlap. He states that

A line needs to be drawn — Day-Glo bright — that demarcates the boundary between work and private life. When a worker is on the job, companies have every right to supervise activities closely. But what an employee does after hours, as
longas no laws are broken, is none of the company’s business. Of course, what we used to call “off hours” are fewer now, and employees may connect to the office nightly from home. But when they do go off the clock and off the corporate network, how they spend their private time should be of no concern to their employer, even if the Internet, by its nature, makes some off-the-job activities more visible to more people than was previously possible.

I can't help but wonder if that's still true, or if it was ever true. The nature of new media technologies, especially so-called social media, is increasingly to create public rhetorical situations, to establish and maintain dialogue. Even Twitter, which is very push-oriented, is designed as a participatory environment, which means that a user's goal is to have their language read publicly and to read the language of others.

Put another way, if your Facebook page or Tweets say things that are - let's say - defamatory, derisive, or otherwise negative about your job, but you made those comments "off the job," are you liable for those comments? No, you didn't say them to your boss, per se, but aren't they public? Do you have some expectation of privacy, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment?

In an interesting article for Wired, security bigshot Bruce Schneier argues that the two-part privacy test articulated in Katz v. United States (or here) doesn't really even apply to new media situations. The sentiment is echoed by the likes of Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld in this article at Ars Technica (hatptip to Schneier).

Get a gmail account. Send/receive some emails. See those Google ads at the top and right of the screen? Those are called "content-driven" ads. That means that Google takes a look at the actual content of your emails, whether it's a buddy giving directions to a restaurant or the most sensitive details about your personal life, and shows you ads that they think are related to that content. That's not privacy. Even if your MySpace or Facebook page is set to "Private," it's easy enough for users to get a look at the content; how carefully do you scrutizine everyone who sends you a "friend request?" What, then, is private about the language we use online?

Meaning: a product not only of language but of typeface?

Several years ago a documentary called Helvetica made the rounds through indie cinemas, film festivals, etc. If "Helvetica" sounds familiar, that's because it's one of the most prevelant fonts (or typefaces) in use today. Look around wherever you go today; I bet you'll see some Helvetica.

Anyway, in the film, Modernist designer Wim Crouwel says that Helvetica is "the most neutral typeface."

He says that he loved using the typeface because "it was a little more 'machines'," suggesting perhaps that the neutrality of the font allowed for accompanying images to really draw attention rather than the text itself.

Meaning (and semantics, for our class' discussions of language) often depends to some extent on context. Situation, audience, etc. often influence the meaning of a "text," regardless of an author's intention. But typefaces often carry with them a sort of visual semantics, a sense of emotion perhaps that helps create that context. That's one reason that we have to be very, very careful not only deciding what words we use to convey meaning, but also with what our presentation (text, images, whatever) might also "say" to an audience.

While on the topic of typeface, you might also check out this awesome video featuring European Design Hall of Famer (no, I'm not kidding) Eric Spiekermann. That opening song is about to become my iPod's "Most Played."

Oh, Google, is there anything you can't do? Literally.

Google has just announced that it will offer a Premer edition of its free office apps (like Google docs) to businesses. In terms of our academic discussions, especially as they pertain to "Professional Writing Technologies," I'm trying to get my head around what that'll mean for the changing face of writing.

So, for $50 per license - that is, "per user" - per year, a company can have access to "Premier" editions of those free, web-based Google apps. Comparing that to the ball-park prices of Office Professional for $440 or even Small Business fro around $300 per user, Google definitely seems to offer a cost-effective solution. Or is it?

To whit (ka-boom), on the face of it (and by that I mean that I haven't fully delved into what the disticntions between Google's Premier and Free are), they seem like very, very similar offerings. That's kind of too bad for Google since they've just launched a big ad campaign promoting these business apps.

However, it's not really bad news for everyone else since the base versions of those apps are already free. And of course it's the ad campaign isn't acutally that bad for Google since it won't cost them that much and they've got more money than they know what to do with. As with everything else Google, the programs are web-based, but evidently there's a free Google plug-in called Gears that'll allow some data to be stored locally.

At the very least, since Google is really good about syncing up their applications (Gmail to YouTube to this very blog!), and now even Google Chrome, could this be just the thing to compete with Microsoft Office's (and/or Works which you can save to older versions of Office) ubiquity (spelled "monopoly")?