The only time I was ever involved with a blog before this one was when a robot I made blogged its way through a modest exhibition in a Melbourne gallery for a couple of weeks in 2002. Sure I read posts since they were plain 'ol newsgroup messages, before mainstream media discovered the internet. And I still prefer message boards to, say, Facebook, for always-on internet coms. But for me, until the first post on Anything But Human, blogging was an undiscovered country.
Any traveller on an alien shore will be at first consumed by the struggle to orient, to familiarize and unfold and unpack the baggage. And after by the complexities of navigating unfamiliar space and finding some sense of place, and belonging, under an alien sky. Not that I'm thinking the landscape is much better defined now than it was for me three months ago.
I seem to have written three times as many posts as I posted. I don't know how usual that is. Some of the unposted seem skeletal, others are way overweight. Still more have wandered far from the point, and others have no point at all. Or any that I can see now. And I was wondering why, in a mediaspace that seems so entwined in consciousness-streaming, I wasn't that comfortable joining in?
I guess for me there will always be more writing than posting. Because if there is something to say it is worth saying well. Because otherwise, what is the point?
I spent a couple of weeks cruising blog posts about Australia's climate change debate. It seems a fairly robust one, if not a pub brawl, and I'm not that comfortable joining in. But when the media is chastised for presenting the debate in full I have to call shenanigans.
The Age/SMH reported Professor Ross Garnaut's concern that there had been a decline in public acceptance of the mainstream science, and it is all the media's fault.
In a flawed attempt at balance, journalists present the views and prognosis put forward by numerous experts working within mainstream, peer-reviewed science, and then weigh them equally against the opinions of a handful of outliers whose views are generally not supported by published evidence.
''That's a very strange sort of balance,'' remarked Garnaut. ''It's a balance of words, and not a balance of scientific authority.''
Anyone can tell a story, but presenting a story from multiple points of view requires heavy lifting, and I'm pleased our media is up for it. And Garnaut's complaint reminds me of the baggage I bought to the undiscovered country of the blog. Although balance is a heavy load, it isn't excess baggage. Balance is fundamental to best practice reportage, and if the Professor can't make headway then maybe the message, or its herald, rather than the messenger, is to blame. After all, if an independent media can't report a debate in full, it isn't independent any more.
There's a lot of credibility given to articles published by scientists in peer reviewed journals, but is the reader aware that particular people are invited to peer review articles submitted for publication and their selection of articles is not an objective process and they are most likely to reflect the underlying philosophy of the journal and/or the consensus viewpoint. In other words I doubt whether many dissenting voices would be published, which results in the community of scientists in peer review journals agreeing with each other on certain aspects. I've read articles for possible inclusion in art/philosophy journals and I can tell you that one becomes aware of one's own prejudices and this affects the kind of material one is likely to approve or disapprove of. And, lets not forget the editors, they have much power in determining whose articles are published. That's why I believe that we need a debate that calls for expert opinion from a number of scientific quarters in regards to so called climate change and not just listen to those who have been set up as the condoned experts.
ReplyDeleteI managed to push the boundaries in peer-reviewed papers for conferences but was never confident enough to do the same with peer reviewed publications. But I think it is still possible to speak with an alternative voice if one is prepared to go the hard yards. A lot of pre prints I read which people said were excluded for being different were just plain ordinary, in my opinion. If one wants to speak with an individual's voice or from a different perspective or both conviction without rigour is simply not good enough most of the time.
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