I was reacting to Chenthil’s non-commital blogpost on the recent plagiarism accusations on The Hindu. Few arguments touched upon rogue blogging. I have some strong comments on rogue blogging and how blogs can be mis-used as anti-fame machines. Here is the extract from the comments that me and Chenthil had on his blog.
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From Chenthil’s blogpost –
This incident set me thinking about this sharp tool called blogging. Take Mr. Bhaskaran. He has been writing for about 20 years. Assuming 20 reviews a year, that makes it 400 reviews. Even if say, 20 of his reviews were inspired, he will be painted as a plagiarist for all 400 of them. It is a little harsh on him. Again I stress, I am not batting for anybody, just thinking out loud how this tool called blogging can be used.
lazygeek said…
//Even if say, 20 of his reviews were inspired, he will be painted as a plagiarist for all 400 of them. It is a little harsh on him. //
Chenthil, I don’t get this logic. How do you say its a little harsh on him. its a matter of integrity when it comes to fourth estate.
Chenthil said…
Guru, the issue I was concerned more here was how blogging can be used to bring down somebody.//
lazygeek said…
Yep !! There are rogue bloggers every where and the idea of rogue bloggings sucks. I agree. Now lets take this analogy to the IIPM case which is very recent. Do you also think that IIPM literally raped by bloggers. Imagine IIPM has been around for a while and they might have given great education even for atleast 200 people, they were ragged by the bloggers for screwing up with one AD on newspapers. Do you think so ?
Also, imagine the tamil nadu police captures so many criminals on a daily basis. do you think they were ragged by bloggers when they were condemened for moral policing with just one hotel.
Are we being balanced here ? If you are saying yes, i’ll have a bigger reply.
Chenthil said…
Guru, of course I am not being balanced. I myself have participated vigorously in IIPM issue and Moral Policing. But of late I am getting this doubt, whether we are using blogging as a tool to bring down things. When I was participating in those issues, I could feel the mob mentality engulfing me, making me feel the potency of power without accountability.
In such mobs, some of those who are shouting along with you won’t be agreeable to you on normal days. But since all of us are shouting for an issue, we tend to forget this fact. To put it in Engineering College slang, whenever there is a fight in collge, there will be a group who will be standing invisible but creating a big noise. We call that “Sound vidarathu”. I am wondering whether blogging is going down that road.
lazygeek said…
Obviously its going in that road. Remember those days when you had asked why I was keeping off senstive issues. This was the reason. Its because we have bandwith and a keyboard that listens to your whims and fancies, by means of senstive topics and sticky posts, we are just becoming rogue bloggers, to the core.
Ofcourse there are people who react because they feel dejected or upset of some issue. i have to say i felt very dejected when i saw the plagiarism. two reasons. one the lazygeek blog is a victim of plagiarism. donno if you know but the reviews and posts are intelligently stolen and some interesting thoughts are added to it make seems like a original post. second, i am a long term reader of hindu. infact right from the start. so i felt dejected and hence that post about hindu.
There are bloggers whom even you can spot so easily who are just waiting for to kick someone and waiting for a prey. those dudes are pretty new and have no clue of the immense satisfaction blogging gives. if its all about eyeballs and page hits and comments gallore, blogging ceases to exist. but thats what we have today and it really sucks. really sucks.
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And before you start to comment here is a quick note. These were comments and they were written with an urgency. Hence they may not really bring out the essence of what i mean. I was trying to compare Chenthils’ logic of argument in Bhaskaran’s case with the IIPM and moral policing issue. My take on moral policing and IIPM remain intact despite these conversations for the sake of an argument. While this argument continues so does the concept of rogue blogging.
kirukkal.com 
15 responses to “Rogue Blogging !!”
Plagiarism is plagiarism – be it done once or a 100 times..
There is a subtle difference between voicing one’s opinion on an issue where he feel like doing so, and just writing reams of lines with tens of links in the guise of opinions.
I have no appreciation for pot-boilers. And for that very reason, I make it a point to keep away from sensitive issues in my blog, unless I feel a really really profound persuasion to say something. I feel no point in the redundancy of adding a few more lines to the tons of lines already written and spoken in media and tons of other blogs on a sensitive issue. I dismiss to dwell on the issues even if it pretends to be a serious writing.
Well, having said that, ponder on what/who actually makes an issue “sensitive”? Bloggers have a certain level of freedom not enjoyed by journalists, and could be more sensible in dealing with the so-called sensitivities rather than pot-boiling their way to fame.
Sometimes, its just about being spoken of…
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Bringing Down Someone is the Objective or Tag line of the Media, be it any media. I have hardly seen the media praise someone.. (except a few times, when few guys are dead..). Thats not being rude.. its only because people hit the news for only doing something Good and Doing something Bad..(most people do bad.. 🙂
You cant get in the news for just walking down the street, and grabbing a cup of coffee. Its only when a person has done something considerably NOTE-WORTHY for whatever reason, he comes to lime light. Thats is why the media tries to talk ill of the person… take his statistics.. dig his history and involve in hell other nasty things and name it Investigative Journalism (we can rechristen it as – “Mission:Defamation” Journalism.
So, if media does that, it is quite natural for Bloggers. Bloggers are half journalists… only that they dont gather the news.. but publish them.
Whatever said.. Bloggers in India arent that independantly powerful (meaning – with just the blogs in hands), and I doubt if we would be.
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Keerthi, I am not worried about whether bloggers can or cannot do it. The mob mentality frightens me. Initially bloggers started out as different from journos. But slowly we are becoming like journos, always in search of the next sensational story. The transformation is frightening – I am exagerrating but it is like what happened in the climax of “Animal Farm”
Thanks for your comment, it crystallised some of my confused thoughts.
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Rogue Blogging??
Hows it different from what most of the tamil dailies report mere rumours as news on the front page?
When such widely circulating magazines and newspapers don’t need to justify what they print,do you think any blogger who most often remains anonymous or under a pseudonym gives a hoot as to what he writes?
Rogue bloggers don’t really create a commotion.The IIPM issue or the Manjunath episode created such a deal in the blogosphere because most of the bloghoppers/bloggers were able to relate to it and genuinely felt like expressing similar views.
In the case of rogue bloggers,they just manage to get some page hits/encoraging comments from their chaddy dosths for their shitty non-confirming views and outlandish claims/unparliamentary language/baseless allegations.Nobody gives a damn to what they say,not even the bloggers themselves who wrote it.
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elai Raapi,
wats with this idea of “oc posting”? athan unakku nu oru edam irukku illa? anga vechukko 😉
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dhoda soltaaaru…saaru..
Since when did anyone have to ask your permission to post/comment on blogs?
Sorry Lazy..for this comment.
But the blogger above:”it” is one such rogue blogger 🙂 with every post/comment of it,begging desperately for attention.
Biscuit irundhaa podunga paa..adhuku.
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>they were ragged by the bloggers for screwing up with one AD on newspapers.
One AD?
What are you? A Dodo?
You seem to have the FAINTEST idea of what the whole IIPM fiasco was about, yet you don’t shy from giving your ‘opinion’ just like the jounalists from the MSM do.
Hey, do some reading dude.
> idea of rogue bloggings sucks
Yea. Now get off the high horse and remove that log from yer eyes.
>Do you also think that IIPM literally raped by bloggers. Imagine IIPM has been around for a while and they might have given great education even for atleast 200 people,
Hey, your point boils down to this: that one single slip will be chased and torn to pieces by the hungry pack of wolves and hyenas that call themselves, the Blogosphere right?
Well, right here on your own blog you say that the whole IIPM issue as about one AD!
Pray, can you elaborate what that one AD was about? Which one AD? Are you in India?
IIPM literally bombards every newspaper with full page ads. Hindu had a full two page spread ad..AND a one full page to go with it. Imagine, a newspaper of 15 pages had three full pages of IIPM’s self-boasting. Filled with bravado that the whole future of Indian management scene depended on them and so on. Atrociously ugly layout and font selection.
They were boasting that their graduates had the best communication skills ever imparted in India. Wowawow. THose communication skills were quite self evident when those morons left comments on Rashmi’s page at youthcurry blog.
ah.. let us see if you have a reply to this or you do the IIPM way – try to dodge issues and censor them.
Thanks!
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Look here:
Is this a simple slip?
http://jagan.biz/modules/news/article.php?storyid=168
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Its now boiling down to something different. Rashmi has been a freelancer and editor of a magazine. More so in the mould of a journo-blogger. And so are a few other bloggers who dwell upon such issues in a really insighful way. Well, nobody is against talking these in blogs and voicing their opinions/frustrations.
There “is” a difference between journalism and blogging. And there is an acceptable scope within which they can be mingled. But more often, certain blogging seems to be trying to play a journalism. A journalist has platform. He/She is out in the field gatherting first hand information talking to people who matter. Certain blogs owned by them or people related to their field do carry their fervors reflected in their blog-writing. And they do play a significant part in the online community.
But where the question stems is when the issues are used by a sect of bloggers as a means to write redundant rantings in the guise of voicing opinions, just for the heck of populating their comment-box with directionless debates. What is the point in being one more disintegrated voice in a crowd of a million people. Such blogs could likely mislead unsuspecting readers only to provoke them into further meaningless ranting.
Talking sensitive issues is safer in the hands of blogs owned by people who “know” what is actually happening, rather than an emotionally discriminate outflow of words digested from reading the varying versions of a million blog voices.
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Guru, I liked the point that you went over related to a mob mentality developing where everyone quite easily ends up taking sides on an issue. I disagree with the point relating to people reacting because they feel unhappy. Now that could actually be a feeling which a mob like mentality creates. So if statement one is true then it automatically leads to statement two where people are apparently drawn into it for reasons that they are made to believe.
Your take on this?
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Guru, my stand is vindicated by Laxmi’s comment 🙂
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Whoever is this Laxmi, never did read the post completely before jumping to post. Seems like someone truly passionate towards the IIPM issue.
BTW, just because you said that I am going to censor or hide away from answering doesn’t gives you a chance to provoke me. Cool it babe !! Go dig the archives and see what I had said about the IIPM issue. If you know tamil, there is a word called vidandaavaatham. my answer comparing IIPM case and moral policing of tamil nadu police was just to show chenthil how his theory on Bhaskaran’s 20 :40 reviews was wrong.
Anyway, thanks for the pointer. a major slip I should say.
Chenthil, Yep you seem to be right on this, thanks to luxmi to prove you on this.
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Kaushik, Agree that this is a vicious circle but then I’m not bothered about people who are fooled into something emotionally. i’m bothered about people waiting for an issue to break out and put up a sensational title for that and seel blogs as hot peanuts.
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pls shut down your computers and go take rest for sometime. then you will stop playing god.
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“Keerthi, I am not worried about whether bloggers can or cannot do it. The mob mentality frightens me. Initially bloggers started out as different from journos. But slowly we are becoming like journos, always in search of the next sensational story.”
— Well said and PERFECTLY echoes my sentiments; I also blogged abt the same – I was actually amused to see so many blogs popping up abt Hindu’s plagarism reviews – I mean, here there were bloggers who read those reviews, went to NYT, dug up those reviews and put them on their blogs – The first person that exposed the story – yes, he did a good job. Everyone else who’s been merely adding to the story by presenting more links, is merely adding sensationalism.
Very well said – I more or less agree with your views.
Keep inkin!
Suyog
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