I do hope, however, that people who want to remove a post they regret aren’t overly castigated for it. Deleting posts should be rare, but I sure hope that the practice doesn’t become so stigmatic that deletion will come at too great a cost. If this happens, I fear that many people will be chilled in their blogging.

I agree in principle with the notion that “one ought to be in complete control of the communication that issues forth from one’s self”. Still, the ability to retroactively edit public statements strikes me as at least somewhat Orwellian. It’s a tricky question.

For the moment, though I’ll sidestep the point; Solove’s post seems more aimed at the question of community norms and ethics rather than at regulations to enforce behaviors. As much as I think editing or deleting statements without notice is unwise at best, I’d object to removing the ability to do so.

The discussion does raise in my mind one of my standard gripes about the evolution of “cyberlaw”, though: the tendency seems to be to find one analogy and to stick with it, no matter how awkward it becomes. A blog is neither a conversation nor a publication, but something else entirely with similarities to both. Yes, a blog entry can evolve in ways that a newspaper article cannot, but (as I see it) the notion of an explicit retraction is not a drawback imposed by the temporal limitations of the press but rather a vital element of transparency in the newspaper’s (limited) dialogue with the readers. When we transcend the limitations of one medium we must be careful to determine what benefits it had and attempt to preserve them in the transition.

To bring us back to explicit examples, Solove’s avoidance of unannotated edits provides an analogous transparency and trustworthiness to his posts that in print I’d find with.. well I’d like to say the New York Times, but that’s another rant entirely. Suffice to say that if I determine that a blogger edits or removes his words without a marker to indicate the fact, it’s more analogous to the Weekly World News in my estimation and esteem.

Blog posts exist in an uneasy position between permanent publications and more informal discussion. How ought they to be viewed when assessing a person’s reputation as a thinker and writer? This question was inspired by a recent discussion about the…

I resist anything more than that, however, as a free speech absolutist principle. Subject to the rights of third parties to take down what you said and remember it themselves (copyright notwithstanding), one ought to be in complete control of the communication that issues forth from one’s self, as one’s representation in the public sphere and avatar in cyberspace.

Just a quick note to let you know that I have enjoyed your blog. A good place to learn!

David Porter

President/CEO

Pacesetter Mortgage

Obviously there is such a thing as an innocuous edit. In fact, the vast majority of edits may be innocuous. However there is such a thing as “fence-building” — designing guidelines more stringently than is strictly required so as to avoid the chance of stepping over a line.

Besides, if an edit is truly innocuous then there’s no reason not to add a note at the bottom of the original post alerting the reader to the fact that it has been altered. In fact, routinely making such notes instills the confidence that the poster is not playing such underhanded games where no such notes are present.

On the other hand, I find something unnerving about undisclosed editing. It would be far too easy to state something offensive, wait for commenters to take one to task, and then change the original post to make the commenters look foolish, or to claim that one was being quoted out of context.

To be more explicit, one should be allowed to go back and retract or expand upon earlier statements. However, comment threads depend essentially upon what came before, and it is intellectually sloppy — if not outrightly dishonest — to alter that root without explicit comment.