Blogging has enormous depth, Ctd

I've looked at the US bloggers Andrew Sullivan (@SullyDish)and Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) and Christopher Hitchens who all talked about the depth of blogging. I also looked at what Paul Krugman had to say about blogging. I've also looked the the UK legal bloggers David Allen Green (@JackofKent) and Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1). The internet has had an incredible democratic and levelling effect. As Paul Krugman said:

"Academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously... if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background."

All the above have attested to the depth, authority and veracity of the new medium. Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) added his voice to the debate:

"The separate categorisation of columnists, reporters, bloggers and interested readers is becoming meaningless. Every citizen is now a potential journalist. News and opinion are a conversation. We still hear occasional complaints from Leftie pundits that online media “lack quality control”. In fact, the dialectic element of blogging ensures a higher standard of accuracy than before. Mistakes are ruthlessly exposed and, because of the sheer number of outlets, a plausible new theory can spread with previously unimagined speed. 

Blogs have improved veracity, quality and diversity. They have not led to the segregation by opinion that many predicted: Leftists and Rightists argue online in a way that never happened when people took just one newspaper. It's true that bloggers, being human, are as prone to cruelty, stupidity and error as anyone else. But it has never been easier to go elsewhere: more people are reading more news and comment than at any time in history."

On what blogging is all about, Greenwald put it best:

"I began [blogging] without any plan to become a journalist or writer, but simply to participate as a citizen."

Blogging has enormous depth, Ctd Modern day pamphleteers

Legal blogger Adam Wagner talking about social media for law professionals here

David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) (@JackofKent) is a legal bloggers who began writing online in 2007 when he created his personal blog Jack of Kent, to promote the public understanding of law. He said that blogging is like being a modern day pamphleteer. He said:

"The elements of speed and self-publication in blogging make it, in my view, akin to pamphleteering... blogging is akin to pamphleteering, then it is pamphleteering with electronic footnotes."

Adam Wagner - Human rights law can help settle Niqaab question

Adam Wagner has it here and cites the presiding judge HHJ Murphy who said:

"No tradition or practice, whether religious or otherwise, can claim to occupy such a privileged position that the rule of law, open justice, and the adversarial trial process are sacrificed to accommodate it. That is not a discrimination against religion. It is a matter of upholding the rule of law in a democratic society."

Adams also notes here:

"The real human rights fight over niqaabs is still to come, when the European Court of Human Rights Grand Chamber assesses France’s ban on niqaabs in all public places (case details here)."

Adam Wagner's personal take is that we should leave it with the rules of the ECHR. He said:

"Whatever your own gut reaction to the niqaab, I suggest that the human rights approach is the best we have available to resolving this complex issue. It allows for the needs of different individuals and groups to be fed into a balancing framework, evolved not from gut instinct or populism but from past experience of dealing with similar issues. The decisions this generates may end up pleasing nobody, but that can also be seen as a success rather than a failure where interests do not, and cannot, entirely coincide."

Adam Wagner on blogging, social media and self-regulation

Hanging around for #leveson? You could read my inquiry statement on social media regulation! http://t.co/mrysUZfq
— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) November 29, 2012

Adam Wagner was asked here: "The Inquiry would also welcome your views on the extent to which the content of websites, and the manner in which you operate, can be regulated by a domestic system of regulation?"

He responded here:

I do not think blogs can or should be regulated by a domestic system of regulation, for the following reasons: 

a. Practically unworkable: Practically it would be impossible to regulate all blogging. Hundreds of thousands of blogs are set up each day, let alone posts published, and the term is so elastic (see above) that the task would be simply too large and amorphous for any regulator to manage. Even if only popular blogs were targeted, say those over a certain number of hits, what is to stop an individual blogger simply setting up a new blog in order to avoid regulation? I expect that such a system would be simply unworkable. 

b. Current system works: The current system of criminal and civil law already provides a reasonable level of regulation. Bloggers - whether their websites are read by 1 or lm people - are subject to financial penalties for libel or quasi-criminal sanctions if they commit a contempt of court. See for example the case of Elizabeth Watson, referred to be below, who was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment (later suspended) for breaching a court order through information published on her personal website. That being said, I also note a 1 February 2012 report in The Independent that Mr Justice Peart has said in relation to an Irish case involving the www.rate-yoursolicitor.com website that "The civil remedies currently available have recently been demonstrated to be an inadequate means of prevention and redress".