Last week I launched an informal survey on the subject of blogging and pluralism.  It was inspired by the Promoting Pluralism Knowledge Programme, a recent initiative of the Hivos Foundation in collaboration with the Kosmopolis Insitute and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS).  Additionally, since this past March, Ben and I have also been using the editorial compilation process of the CyberChaikhana book as an internal pluralism audit of neweurasia itself.  I’ll let you all know the results in a few weeks (and as time goes on I intend to run more scientific surveys and studies, both of neweurasia and the Stanosphere).  In the meantime, I’d like to share a few thoughts on the role pluralism plays in a news service, especially one such as ours.

There are a lot of definitions for the term “pluralism,” as evidenced by this Wikipedia entry. But if we understand pluralism generally as not only an engagement with “the Other” but as an active acceptance, promotion, and institutionalization of the Other’s rights, then pluralism is something an organization may seek to do or that is a consequence of its actions. Pluralism-as-aim and pluralism-as-consequence are not mutually exclusive; in fact, in news services the two types are mingled. The types of stories a news service runs, and the manner and medium by which it runs them, can and do have the effect of mitigating or promoting pluralism.

There is no such thing as “neutral information,” nor for that matter “information neutrality,” ideas usually referred to in journalist lingo as “just the facts” and “pure objectivity,” respectively.  A salient challenge is language, i.e., what is and isn’t expressible in a given grammar and vocabulary, not to mention the texture of ideas therein. Another challenge, one that looms large, is censorship, be it imposed externally or from within the news service. Cultural sensitivities, business interests, and government agendas, all of which exist in a kind of yin-yang ratio to each other, come to bear upon the editorial decision-making process of a news service, so that even in a free and open society such as the United States certain topics — and hence, certain perspectives — are “off the table.”  But responsible news services are always confronted with the blind-men-and-the-elephant problem; they are duty-bound to abide by a journalistic anekāntavāda.

Ideally, this is where the Internet comes to the rescue: the more blind men feeling the elephant, then theoretically the more accurate the picture of said pachyderm becomes. The beauty of the Internet is its interactivity, in which the invisible wall between reporter and reader is torn down, not to mention the veil between of professional and amateur, elite and citizen. The truest breed of online journalism is therefore citizen journalism, and in the last few years the world has witnessed an upwelling of perspectives that have been historically filtered out by the hierarchical structures of the “real world” pros.

However, online/citizen journalism, though anarchic in potential, is not necessarily anarchic in practice. Take blogging for example, which is the medium that immediately comes to mind when someone thinks of online/citizen journalism (and which is at the heart of what neweurasia does). Blogging has a reputation for giving voice to the unheard, but this may more likely be due to its historical origins among “cybergeeks” and malcontents than to its present day-to-day use by diarists and specialists. In fact, it remains to be seen whether the blog naturally lends itself in any one perspective-direction (conformism, mainstreamism, alternativism, or undergroundism) or is merely a neutral tool as subject to issues of class, education, ethnicity, and accessibility as, say, the television. Yet, the new medium of blogging has in its favor an intrinsic lack of hierarchical editorial structures, resource-based publication limitations (paper and ink), and external societal pressures, all of which too often conspire to constrain the diversity of views expressed in traditional formats. Moreover, blogging is benefited by an open-ended spectrum of available subject matters: even the most conformist of bloggers have been known to write about subjects that would make print and television reporters blush.

What I’m getting at is that journalism in general and online/citizen journalism in particular is necessarily always in a state of actively deciding whether or not to be pluralistic.  For all its potential, the new medium nonetheless lends itself very strongly to what I call “memoirism,” that is, the threat of becoming self-centered and narcissistic, to narrow the perspective so far as to completely block out the voice of “the Other.”   As online/citizen journalists, we would do well to keep in mind this quote from blogger Larry Sanger in Citizendium:

And I have to say that my talking to you on this blog does not count as full-blooded social relations!  Should I be telling this to a friend?  Well, I can speak to more people this way, and have a bigger impact.  But in doing so am I ignoring a subtle negative impact that the medium has on me?