Mindful Ink     Life, Living and Productivity

I’ve been vacillating on this a bit the past few days. On one hand, I think it’s funny. On another hand, this was a “serious event and they may have done some damage to the professional wrap of bloggers”, or so say some.

Except, I’m not sure how true that is. We all know what the vast majority of bloggers are, and they are not us or sites like Gizmodo or Lifehacker. We already have that working against us. We have the “Me Media” in all its horror (Leave Britney alone!) working against us every single day, so it is kind of hard to imagine that Gizmodo’s little prank (which still, whatever you may think, amounts to turning off some TV’s) really changed that. Is it something I would have done? Or something I think appropriate? No. I don’t. I do agree with their defense, linked below, that the journalists job is to play pundit and critic and should never get too cozy with the companies they report on. That doesn’t mean act like adolescents, but it does constitute a core of journalistic integrity that we should all try to stick too.

And, as they say, it can be difficult sometimes. If you do your job well, if you don’t pull your punches, if you can be counted on to be honest and reliable and you become a popular blogger it does mean free products to try, it does mean face time with people you normally wouldn’t be able to speak with, and it does mean opportunities that can corrupt your integrity before you know it. And it can have consequences, too. Gaming magazines have traditionally been infamously in the pockets of the gaming companies, and as they’ve been able to become more independent and are less likely to give Conker’s Bad Fur Day a good review because it was made by X company, people have lost their jobs and magazines have lost access to the products they depend on to review.

But, be that as it may, the importance of independence and integrity doesn’t equate to the gravity in damaging the work of others for no apparent reason. It may be a very sensible prank, but think of the individuals who have as their job to make sure their demonstrations go smoothly - their livelihood is immediately in jeopardy (and that isn’t an over-reaction, just because no one got fired doesn’t mean it wasn’t a foreseeable, possible outcome).  How would you like to be in their shoes? Gizmodo’s prank does nothing to further journalistic integrity, or show they are somehow the renegades of the “large, corporate chain of blogs” world - it was just a stupid prank.

But as those of us who try to be professional in the world of blogging or journalism, we have to continue to deal with these sorts of incidents (as more will happen) and the stigma that attaches itself to all of what I call “Me Media.” We’re just now moving out of the “Oh, you blog…? Does that mean you talk about your cats and your feelings?” so there is some importance in continuing that momentum. But Gizmodo isn’t going to hurt that, not much can given what is already going on - what will help, however, is those of us who are professionals continuing to be professionals. The rest will take care of itself.

Giz Banned For Life and Loving It: On Pranks and Civil Disobedience at CES

In the last part of this series I talked primarily about the importance and value of the education you can only give yourself - expanding your intellect and abilities beyond the classroom. It’s fairly abstract, so the rest of this series will be about how you educate yourself.

Our post yesterday concerned RSS feeds, and why that is important is that is one of the easiest ways to educate yourself in one of the most fundamental of ways: current events. Now, you can also setup a homepage (as we discussed here) and I think that’s a great idea, too. But I think it’s important to go beyond that as well, and this is where RSS feeds are an improvement. Homepages are pretty easy to ignore, making your news-feeds a daily routine, however, has some value. You can, of course, build this into your homepage (iGoogle, for instance, allows you to embed their newsreader into your page.)

Current events, however, is an absolute cornerstone of being educated. You need to know what’s going on in the world around you. Why? Well, it’s your world. It absolutely does effect you. And what’s more to the point, these issues do come up in “real life” from the classroom to the voting booth. And, to wax political for a moment, democracy only works when the voting populace is educated (and you can see how well that’s working out.)

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