Emboldened by the fact that Tongues of Fire is downloaded from this site 25 times a week, I’m thinking of putting another, more ambitious work of fiction online. I’d like to illustrate it and otherwise add elements of “multimedia.” The perfect illustrations (since I cannot make my own) would be certain Old Master drawings by the likes of Guercino and Domenichino. Unfortunately, there are remarkably few such images online, because the owners of the originals tend to refuse permission to disseminate them electronically. Even public museums usually block people from photographing their collections unless we agree not to sell or give away the images we make. For the same reason, the countless beautiful illustrations in my University’s Art Library are not to be copied. I have been looking at old books–volumes published more than 75 years ago–that reproduce baroque master drawings. They contain many beautiful images that would fit my purposes perfectly. The books are in the public domain, but what about their illustrations? Does the Queen of England own the rights to a photograph taken of one of her drawings in 1900? What about an etching or mezzotint that reproduces a drawing that she owns?

I am trying to obey the law, but only because I don’t want to encounter problems later. From a moral point of view, I find it outrageous that owners of beautiful objects, especially public libraries and museums, should prevent their electronic reproduction. As a result of this short-sighted and selfish policy, an extraordinarily small proportion of great art can be found on the World Wide Web.

Way back in 2001 (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive”), I wrote an article about the Internet and civil society. That piece has been reprinted in five versions, each updated and edited for a new occasion. The latest edition appeared just today: "The Internet and Civil Society," in Verna V. Gehring, ed., The Internet in Public Life (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 79-98.

I argue that the Internet is potentially good for civil society, but we need to worry about five problems:

The rest of the book is a useful contribution to debates about the political and social impact of the Internet. It’s ideal for college courses, since it’s small and priced at $16. It is a product, by the way, of my main institutional home, the Institute for Philosophy & Public Policy, which among other activities is generating a series of inexpensive paperback anthologies on public issues.

Blogs are clearly the hot medium. They have scale: Technorati is tracking 3.6 million of them, and there may be many more. No one knows the size of the audience, but the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 3% of Americans with Internet access ?read someone else?s web log or ?blog?? on a typical day, and 17 percent have ever done so. (These survey figures were collected in February.) Since more than 60% of American adults have Internet access, that translates into roughly 3.6 million daily viewers in the United States.

(It?s just a coincidence that the best count of the world’s blogs, 3.6 million, currently equals the number of US daily viewers, but this does suggest something important about the medium. It’s “many-to-many.” In contrast, the number of TV viewers is enormously larger than the number of TV channels.)

Blogs have impact. It?s hard to measure their effect on the ?real world,? but (just for example) many believe that Trent Lott fell because of commentary in the blogosphere. We do not live in a time of very impressive social movements (at least in the US), but the ones we?ve got?among them, rigorous libertarianism, anti-globalization, and Christian Conservatism?have made effective use of blogs.

Blogs have limitations, too. They do not generate new information or policy ideas so much as they comment on the raw material generated originally by reporters, TV news crews, government agencies, advocacy groups, think tanks, and academics. The political blogs are mostly concerned with national and international issues, even though many important decisions are made at the local and state levels. Blogs may strengthen or even create networks within national and international affinity groups, but I do not know of cases in which blogs have enhanced ?social capital? at a neighborhood, municipal, or regional scale.

Blogs are not institutionalized in conventional ways. There is no business plan that allows them to generate enough revenue to pay salaries. Some organizations have created blogs (notably, newspapers, magazines, and political campaigns), but these groups obtain their revenues from other sources.

The lack of institutionalization could mean that blogs will turn out to be something of a fad or bubble. I?m sure some form of regular self-publishing will persist, but 3.6 million blogs could turn out to be the high water mark. Bloggers are competing for a fairly small number of ?eyeballs? right now and have to deal with unpleasant phenomena like ?comment spam.? The word ?blog??which is exceptionally ugly?may fade and begin to connote a fashion of the early 2000s.

I can also imagine that blogs will be institutionalized, and the most influential ones will have their own salaried writers, support staffs, and stable audiences. Or, finally, I can imagine that blogs will persist and flourish without institutionalization, as purely voluntary and individual projects. That would prove that the Internet really is different: more of a large-scale voluntary commons than anything we have ever seen before.

(Warning: if you have a blog of your own, you already know what I’m about to say, and this may be boring.) My blog usually gets hit four or five times a day by “spam.” People post ads, often for extremely unsavory products, as comments. Their motive is to generate links to their own sites so that they will rank higher on Google searches. Spammers use software to place their comments, so that they can post many in a short time. Last night, I was hit by more than 100 separate comments, all advertising a particularly disgusting and illegal form of pornography. These comments are difficult to remove with MovableType–it takes five clicks plus a certain amount of waiting to get rid of each one. MoveableType allows you to block particular computers from posting comments, but spammers now hide their identity by using fake IP addresses. Every one of last night’s spam comments had a different address.

There are solutions. For example, you can change the technical structure of your site so that it’s much harder for programs to “know” automatically how to post comments. This kind of change is not easy for someone like me to make, however–it would take me at least an afternoon, and I would probably mess it up at first.

The other kind of solution essentially involves restricting public uses of one’s site. I could, for example, block all comments on old entries. However, I like the serious remarks that periodically appear on archived posts. I could get rid of comments altogether and tell people just to email me. But that barrier might discourage participation. So it’s a dilemma, and it exemplifies the dark side of all open networks.

If any spammer reads this (and I’m sure they won’t), I would make one request. If you are going to advertise some kind of exploitative sex involving minors as a response to one of my earnest comments about civility or civic education, please don’t compound the insult by writing “Nice site,” or “Good point” in the comment field. It drives me nuts.

I owe a paper on the reliability of online medical information. I’m thinking of the following title: “Misinformation in Online Medical Information: What is the Role of Schools?” My answer would be: Schools should have as small a role as possible, because we have already loaded too many responsibilites on them, and they are not well positioned to teach “media literacy.” An outline follows.

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