Bloggers' Freedom and responsibility

Breaking the vacuum -- The Week::Jon Stock -- Last Word: "Bloggers are deceiving themselves if they conclude that they are writing in some sort of critical vacuum. No matter how pitiful their readership, they are penning more than a personal diary the moment they choose to upload it to the Internet. And with publication, however modest, comes responsibility.

Take the blog of one Vivek Kumar, a lively writer based in New Delhi. Now, I would never have come across this particular blog (vivekspace.blogspot.com) if I hadn’t been the sort of sad author who runs his book titles through Google once in a while (okay, once a day). Late last month he announced that he had borrowed my latest novel, The Cardamom Club, from a library and would be reviewing it shortly. Then, a few days later, he wrote the following: "I finished reading The Cardamom Club. The book is not even worth commenting on. Don’t bother buying/borrowing it. I’ll return it to the library tomorrow and hunt for something with some substance."

Apart from the fact that he had borrowed rather than bought it, I was mightily miffed by this. Not that he didn’t like it (I’ve got the skin of a rhino—you should have read what The Hindustan Times said), but that he couldn’t even be bothered to share his comments. In short, he had assumed that he was unaccountable, but he was—to me.

So what did I do? I tried to contact him by posting various messages on his blog. And that’s when I realised quite what a surreal place the Internet can be. Try as I might, it was very hard to persuade Vivek that it was actually me, as other ‘Jon Stocks’ had duly posted messages. In the end, we made contact in the real world and Vivek, to give him his due, has now honoured his responsibilities to a fellow scribe and posted a detailed review of the book, complete with suggestions for the Bollywood version (Hrithik Roshan to play the lead).

He still doesn’t like it, which is fine (I don’t care much for his own attempts at science fiction), but we’re getting on like a house on fire these days and I have become quite a fan of his blog, particularly a recent, utterly gripping account of a UPSC interview he once survived. The transcript of his encounter with the formidable Arundhati Ghose—she of the "not now, not never" address to the United Nations conference on disarmament in 1996—should be compulsory reading for any aspiring diplomat (Vivek now works for the Indian Foreign Service).

My point, I suppose, is a simple one: the Internet might seem a thoroughly vast and unanonymous place, but as search engines trawl ever more deeply through the sea of Web pages out there, it’s becoming smaller, more intimate and, ultimately, more accountable. On the whole, I think that’s a good thing. Freedom and responsibility are not such unpleasant bedfellows, are they?"