[iDC] disagreement by deletion/addition

[Frank Pasquale]

That's a good account of a fundamental divide on the nature of
disagreement.  I have a few responses.

1) Perhaps there are places where "disagreement by deletion" is good.  For
example, in reports put out by credit bureaus, if a creditor said something
about my behavior that is unduly negative, I may not merely want to add my
side of the story, but also to delete the "wrong side."

2) But even this old system of reputation management had some measure of
"disagreement by addition."  You can, for example, put your account of a
credit dispute on the report in case the bureau can't resolve the dispute
(under the US's FCRA).

3) The key problem here is a difference between facts and opinions.  *Perhaps
opinion statements always ought to invite disagreement by addition; perhaps
facts invite disagreement by deletion.  *That may be why wikipedia is great
for its science pages, but raises all sorts of concerns when it deletes bios
on the basis of a group of editors' opinions about the subject's
importance.  That latter insistence on "fame" seems like a form of
artificial scarcity to me.

4) Finally, I have written a paper arguing that search engines need to give
people a right to "disagree by addition."  There are many "privacy" or
"reputational" challenges arising out of search results.  For example, one
New York Times reporter recently recounted her unsuccessful effort to keep a
webpage featuring an unflattering photograph of herself from appearing as a
high-ranked web result when her name was a query on Google.  Google won't
take down the result--but shouldn't such a person be able to annotate it
(with, say, an asterisk linking to a page with a better picture)?

I propose a right not to suppress the results, but merely to add an asterisk
next to the hyperlink directing web users to another webpage, which would
lead to the complainant's own comment on the objectionable result. Such a
right would be based on consumer protections guaranteed by the Fair Credit
Reporting Act.

Anyway, the paper is here:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=888327

A critique is here:
http://yalelawjournal.org/2007/09/08/grimmelmann.html

and I'll be happy to send anyone my response to the crititque--it will be
published next month.

best wishes,
--Frank
blogs @
concurringopinions.com
madisonian.net





On 12/6/07, Paul B. Hartzog <paulbhartzog at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> conversation starter:
>
> Deletionism, or Disagreement by Deletion
>
> long time ago in my naive days
> Sunir Shah and I got talking about what was good about wikis.
>
> one of the key things was:
> 1) disagreement by deletion
> vs.
> 2) disagreement by addition
>
> DbD was the old-school political philosophy of exclusive practice,
> i.e. deciding who is "in" and who is "out"
>
> DbA was the new-school of pluralization, pluralism, and conversation,
> i.e. including perspectival acknowledgement as part of the process
>
> I actually used to lecture that this was a KEY reason why wikis are
> politically revolutionary, which is that by using DbA they
> 1) mesh with a multivocal world
> 2) function on inclusion instead of fragmentation (echo chamber)
>
> Now we see the "new" spaces, turning into "old" spaces
> by adopting the same rules as the old.
>
> Question:
> Is this a historical inevitability.  Will new open spaces that emerge,
> ALWAYS become co-opted by the old rules systems?  Will they
> ALWAYS be forced (as they scale?) to adopt the old rules?
>
> thoughts?
>
> -p
>
> --------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.PaulBHartzog.org
> http://www.panarchy.com
> PaulBHartzog at PaulBHartzog.org
> PaulBHartzog at panarchy.com
> PHartzog at umich.edu
> --------------------------------------------------------
> The Universe is made up of stories, not atoms.
>                 --Muriel Rukeyser
>
> See differently, then you will act differently.
>                 --Paul B. Hartzog
> --------------------------------------------------------
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