Rating online content can work; rating news can't

[Bill Stewart]

At 06:34 PM 7/23/97 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>Since the Supreme Court said the online world should be as free as
>print, and no self-labeling system exists for magazines or newspapers,
>why should the Net be any different?  I don't believe that a self-rating
>system is either practical or desirable.  Enactment of any laws to put
>teeth into Internet self-ratings will almost certainly run afoul of
>Constitutional challenges, and without such laws compliance and thus
>widespread acceptance is unlikely.

Genuinely voluntary self-rating systems, and third-party rating-services,
are both practical and desirable for some kinds of communications.
(Mandatory systems are of course evil and inadequate.)
Not only are there people who are concerned about what their kids will see,
there are also readers who don't want to be bothered with SPAM,
readers who only want to join Better-Business-Bureau-approved MLM scams,
Usenet readers who don't want their porn diluted with phone sex ads,
web users who'd like to get further information on products without
getting junk email as well, and all sorts of applications that
don't fit well into the standard two-deadly-sins model or the
"one rating service knows all the sites you don't want to see" model.

Voluntary rating systems allow a multiplicity of values.
The latest TV ratings and V-Chip model not only can't cope with
rating news*, it also doesn't rate TV commercials -- which would score
high on greed/envy/gluttony/sugar-content/boredom,
none of which deadly sins are covered by the V-Chip scale
but are often more interesting criteria both to parents and viewers
than the sex and violence - parents know The Disney Channel isn't going
to show porn on Saturday mornings.  If your VCR also knew about ratings,
you'd be able to watch the shows commercial-free on tape...

Multiple voluntary ratings systems do mean that the information you
want to see won't always have a rating from a rating system you use;
that's the way it goes.  If it's voluntary, then some readers will set
their browsers to fail open, and some will set them to fail closed,
and some will be exposed to rating services that may offer them
other ways to find high-quality reading than the ones they use today.

And, yes, search engines that know about Interestingness ratings 
can be a win, if you've got some criteria that simple keyword searches
don't describe well enough to pick the best 100 of 512387 matches.
	
>I have no doubt that the definition of 
>what qualifies as a bona fide news organization is in the
>eye of the beholder.  I certainly would not class CNET with any of the
>major US newspapers, magazines nor the WSJ.  

This is cyberspace.  Everybody's a bona-fide news organization.
Some are more organized than others, and some make up more of the 
news as they go along than others (which network blew up cars?),
and some people focus more on commentary than events or analysis,
but the oligopoly model -- a few newspapers which can afford distribution,
a few TV stations with government-granted spectrum monopolies,
and a few big wire services spoon-feeding everybody -- is dead.
Freedom of the press belongs to anyone who owns one, and that's
everyone who can afford a used PC and a free Juno account...
The big news organizations can still add a lot of value,
but there are a lot more voices in the game.

Bona Fide News Organizations during the Gulf War gave us the Pentagon 
Nintendo films; almost nobody went out in the battlefield reporting real 
news, but if Iraq had a decent Internet infrastructure we wouldn't have 
had to wait for Ramsey Clark's video.  The live Internet reporting during 
the Russian coup and the Chinese fax barrage during TienanMen Square 
weren't from Isvestia or the Chinese government-recognized press, 
but they were the real news.

*A classic example of news ratings not working are the
Vietnam war pictures of the naked girl running with napalm on her,
and the Vietnamese army officer shooting a prisoner in the head;
a V-Chip would ding them for nudity and violence, but they were
two of the most images of that war.  We were lucky those pictures
came out; any proposal that would deny the similar pictures in the
next war an open rating because it's not from a "bona fide" news org
is censorship of a sort unacceptible in a free society.





#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts at ix.netcom.com
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