Wednesday Afternoon Links

Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading.

- Greg picks up on some of the positives of the NDP's youthful new caucus. But the appeal should be broader than campus outreach: after all, what better contrast could one build to a theme of "tired old politics" than to be able to point to plenty of bright, young MPs as the future of both the NDP and the country?

- Meanwhile, in the department of old and outdated politics, Brigitte Alepin notes how tax laws have utterly failed to keep up with widespread evasion techniques. And the answer is to coordinate on laws and enforcement mechanisms, not to buy the corporatist line that we should instead give up on taxing wealthy individuals or businesses or entirely.

- Have you prostrated yourself sufficiently before your Conservative overlords? Apparently Michael Ignatieff hasn't.

- Finally, while I don't agree with all of Sixth Estate's analysis, I'll heartily endorse this suggestion as to how we can put the wave of interest in politics to good use:

For the moment the Internet is considerably more democratic than the rest of the media. That gives us some room to move, and about the only good thing about a majority is that we can say for certain we have time to work with. There will be at least one more election in Canada — contrary to what some scared people are saying, there will probably be many more. This is good, because the core Harper team is so demonstrably, inexplicably corrupt and incompetent (batting one for three against the weakest Liberal leaders in generations) that there is a very real chance this party will spectacularly self-destruct in the future, much like the Tories did in 1993 and in 1935. We’ve got until that happens to change the political climate of this country so that whoever replaces him is forced to make real reforms, not just mouth platitudes and turn his back on the electorate like, say, Barack Obama.

I don’t want to understate the magnitude of the problem. It’s very serious. The media are openly arrayed in favour of Conservative government because it is pro-business and because it has mastered the art of simple, misleading, headline-driven stories. The polling system makes coordination vital, to an extent that progressive and centrist Canadians are going to have extreme difficulty. And we’re running out of time, probably no matter what Canada does...

But I also think it would be wrong to underestimate the tools we have available to us. Right now it is a trivial matter for me or another blogger to build a site that could be read by every politically conscious Canadian on a regular basis. Not that every politically conscious Canadian would want to, of course. But it could be done. When it comes to information and communication, the technical disparity between elites and dissidents is now lower than it has been in literally thousands of years. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and the failed revolutions in Iran, Bahrain, and several other countries, are a testament to this. And we don’t have to worry about the army shooting at us, like they did. The problem we have is coordinating our efforts and getting people to notice. Those are big problems, but not as big as the problem the Internet solved for us in the first place.

On access restrictions

The Star-Phoenix editorial board is thoroughly annoyed that individuals are able to use access-to-information legislation to do actual research and reporting. And it wants to see those unprovoked acts of journalism come to an end:

But sometimes the fault doesn't lie with the civil servant so much as it does with the political motives of the people demanding the information. In the case of the city's backlog, almost all of the requests come from two citizens -- with the vast majority coming from one -- who have a political agenda to prove conspiracies and back-room dealing.

A six-year delay in processing a claim, even when the delay is outside the city's control, plays into those theories.
...
By having each step and decision done in the open, the public can determine whether the interim rulings by the city, commissioner and judge are reasonable.

And it also would put pressure on those who would blanket officials with costly, frivolous and politically motivated requests to curtail their abuses.

Now, it's one thing if an individual is actually motivated by a desire to annoy a particular government institution or local authority rather than to actually discover information. And in that type of case there's reason to want to build in protections against such genuinely frivolous requests.

But the fact that a few individuals have enough interest in politics to make the effort to use every citizen's right to access and share public documents should be seen as a plus for government transparency, not an "abuse" to be curbed. And if the access systems currently in place don't include enough resources to answer the requests of a couple of citizens, then that failure to make access a priority - not the fact that the requests are being made - is the problem that demands a solution.

On pseudonymity

There's been loads of talk over the past couple of days about the unfortunately-departed Tiny Perfect Blog. But most of the discussion seems to be riddled with undue potshots at one of the better political bloggers I've read based solely on the anonymity behind the blog - and while there's one unfortunate side to the story which doesn't seem to have been mentioned yet, it's worth taking some time to make the case in defence of anonymous or pseudonymous blogging in the face of that misplaced criticism.

The core of the argument against TPB in particular and anonymity in general seems to be highlighted by Graham Thomson:

Tiny Perfect wasn't the only anonymous blog on Alberta politics, but it gained a reputation as the nastiest. Most bloggers put their names front and centre, which tends to make them think twice before hitting "send." The AUPE's Climenhaga has been running a personal blog since 2007 and says while he doesn't want to sound holier-than-thou compared to Tiny Perfect, "if my opinion is going to have any validity in my community it's important to say who I am."

What's of course utterly lacking in Thomson's analysis is any basis for concluding that anonymous or pseudonymous bloggers are generally any less likely than named ones to "think twice before hitting 'send'", or any less entitled to have their opinions heard. After all, whether an individual is named or not, credibility within the blogosphere tends to come from exactly the same factors.

When it comes to opinions, there's especially little reason to bother differentiating between named and anonymous sources. The value of the opinion expressed within a blog is bound to come down to a question of how readers respond to the blog in substance: an insightful observation or compelling argument is no less so for being written anonymously, just as a piece of poorly-reasoned tripe doesn't become any more convincing by having a name attached to it.

In that sense, the blogosphere at least holds out the prospect of a meritocratic structure: the value of an opinion is at least theoretically found in its own content, such that a person who isn't well-known or even named can reach a wide audience with a good point (or be skewered for a bad one).

Which isn't to say that personal connections don't dictate at least in part how widely a particular view ends up being distributed, giving an advantage to people or profiles who are better known. But there too, there's little reason why an extended track record of connections through a blog persona should be ignored entirely.

What about factual assertions? Again, the major question there is whether a blogger's track record matches the facts which can be verified from other sources including one's own observations.

Of course, one may see reason to be suspicious where any blogger without a track record of accuracy makes implausible or inflammatory claims. But there's no reason why the same content would be seen as any more or less trustworthy depending on whether it's written by brand-new anonymous blogger Mr. X., or brand-new named blogger John Smith whose judgment is equally untested and untestable. And where an anonymous blog has provided accurate information in the past, there's no reason why the mere fact of anonymity should prevent readers from considering that fact in assessing future information from the same source.

And there should be no doubt that anonymity is far from decisive in either direction in assessing a blogger's judgment. While Thomson paints TPB as "the nastiest (anonymous blog)" in Alberta, he distinctly fails to take into account the far greater amount of vitriol and nastiness to which others have happily attached their names. And I can assure Thomson that at least some pseudonymous bloggers are interested enough in their own reputation that they do think twice before hitting "send" even if their names aren't attached to the blog.

With all that out of the way, though, there are a couple of points where my own perspective parts company with that of TPB. And the differences might hint at what I'd see as the biggest questions which would-be anonymous bloggers may want to keep in mind.

When I started blogging semi-anonymously, that choice was based on a combination of uncertainty as to how my own experiment in blogging would play out, and a fairly gentle request from my employer. While I've seen fit to keep the blog in the same format, that's been more a matter of sticking to a default than any determined commitment to avoid having my name known. And a growing list of people has come to know who I am personally - meaning that if anybody was particularly motivated to "out" me, it wouldn't be particularly difficult to do so.

But there are two reasons why that would provoke far less of a concern for me personally than it seemed to for TPB.

First, while I don't recall the blog being as inflammatory as Thomson makes it out to be, it does seem that TPB wound up making some enemies who saw the blog as a direct threat. That may not be such a bad result in terms of serving the gadfly role where blogs can often do their best work - but it also leads to a virtual certainty that somebody will "take an interest" in exposing and attacking the individual behind a blog.

Of course, I've spent plenty of time in the realms of snark and satire myself. But I'd like to think that I've also taken a respectful enough posture toward those who don't share my viewpoints that nobody holds the kind of grudge that would make them want to move past the medium of discussion of issues in the blogosphere.

More importantly, though, I'm also lucky enough to be in a position where anonymity is more a matter of convenience than necessity. That certainly won't be true for some potential bloggers, and apparently wasn't for TPB - but it's always kept the perceived risk of being named at a level where I've seen little reason to worry.

In sum, for anybody wondering whether blogging anonymously is at all tenable, these are the factors to keep in mind. Are you expecting to be blogging in a way that will provoke people to want to do you harm? And will you in fact consider yourself harmed substantially if your identity gets made public?

Unfortunately, the answers for TPB seem to have been "yes" and "yes", making for a highly dangerous combination. And we've lost what looked to be one of the better NDP blogs I've seen as a result. But while the result may be a cautionary tale for anybody considering following in TPB's footsteps as an anonymous blogger, there's no basis for spinning the incident as reason to slam the nature of anonymous or pseudonymous blogging in general.

On interested parties

For those interested in seeing a bite taken out of Canada's new stenographers, recent posts by skdadl and Dave are definitely worth a look.

But as I noted in a comment on Dave's post, the problems within Canadian media goes far beyond journalistic concessions to Harper's desire to control the immediate message. Indeed, one could hardly find a better example of the contrast between merely sucking up to a particular government and an insistence on imposing a corporatist worldview than the National Post's admonition that Harper's already-reckless tax slashing has only whetted its appetite for another wholesale attack on the federal government.

Of course, that kind of message likely serves Harper's ideological interests in the long run as well. But it also serves to highlight the gap between the Cons' short-term political calculations - which have to take into account at least some of the obvious desire to provide more than just tax cuts - and the forces which can't get rid of effective government soon enough.

It's worth keeping in mind that in the long term, the media still does call the shots to a significant extent: its prominent figures are likely to occupy prominent roles far longer than most politicians, and it's able to take a longer-term view which tends to fall by the wayside in a four-year (or less) electoral cycle. Unfortunately, though, far too many of Canada's loudest voices are eager to see Harper and future governments go even further than the Cons already have in demolishing collective values.

Granted, some increased willingness to stand up to Harper would be a positive first step in moving toward a more reasonable balance in the interests represented within Canada's media. But the problem of concentrated corporate media can't be solved anywhere near that easily - and that's the battle which will have a more far-reaching impact on Canada's long-term direction.

On compilations

While the Star's list of Con lies and flip-flops is worth a look, its lack of clear criteria or sourcing also helps to highlight one of the areas where traditional media hasn't caught up to the type of work being done by citizen media.

Not that a media outlet couldn't keep close track if it chose to dedicate sufficient resources to doing so - with the blogosphere likely serving as one of the more important sources. But for now, anyone wanting a remotely thorough list of Harper's misdeeds in government is far better off going here than to any major media site. And the Star's brief equivalent only highlights just how far the mainstream has to go in order to catch up.