The Arrington Controversy: A JSM briefing

The blogosphere's startups mogul is under house arrest for blog crimes he says he didn't commit

A case of mistaken identity?

Who is really responsible for stopping Mike Arrington leaving his house (to go to parties and have conversations he can safely blog about)?

The facts:

• Arrington wants to be rich and famous (according to the Wall Street Journal )
• He writes (with his team, working at his stable of news websites, lead by TechCrunch ) about products and services which crop up in conversations he's having with Web 2.0 start-ups
• He believes that Web 2.0 represents a revolution in business and media
• He believes that blogs are a source of honest and accurate news
• He doesn't believe that mainstream media (MSM) are honest or accurate
• He believes that blogs and Web 2.0 is the future and that mainstream media is dead
• He invests (and helps other venture capitalists invest) in Web 2.0 start-ups

Interview: Bruce Irvine

Here is the Journal of Social Media's first Podcast

It's an extremely enlightenening (unless, unlike us, you already know everything there is to know about the inner workings of the 'mind of the blogosphere', assuming it has one) three way conversation between the journal's founders (Stephen Fitzpatrick and Peter Friedman) and Bruce Irvine of the Grubb Institute, where we roam into the stormy but mostly uncharted waters which lie somewhere between where 'conventional blogging' (whatever that is) ends and a strange new monster (which seems to be a poorly understood combination of blogging, journalism, business and Web 2.0) lurks.

It contains:

Something unintentional which can occasionally be heard in the background which sounds irritatingly like a frenetic squirrell

Peter Friedman sounding as if he is being extremely disrespectful towards Mike Arrington (when in fact, as he makes clear he is actually being sympathetic with Mike's predicament, which seems to have far more wide-ranging implications for the future of business and journalism than 'whether Mike will ever be able to go to a party again')

Download bruce_on_arrington3.mp3

The conflict

How do these convictions and behaviours produce conflict?

The MSM are responding to Arrington's attacks on them by scrutinising his blogging about start-ups in order to try to discover examples of any failure to disclose vested interests.

When he attends events and has conversations with prospective investments i.e., web 2.0 start-ups which he intends to write about, he is now finding that he is coming under attack for having failed to write about them.

The sheer volume of attention his success is generating is now threatening to undermine his natural support base amongst the Web 2.0 start-up, investment and blogging communities.

The issues

What happens when business and blogging get together and succeed in reaching a large audience?

This turns the blogger into an institution, with a new and critical set of social relationships between the bloggers, business, media, audiences and the conversations they are blogging about.

What does this mean for business bloggers?

If you become a really successful blogger, you're probably going to become a business.

At this point, you're also going to become a part of the MSM. 

So what really changes?

Crucially it's not just the blogger's relationship with the MSM that changes as things develop: as Arrington is discovering, there's also a crucial change in the blogger's relationship with the blogosphere itself.

Mike Arrington thinks it's the MSM who are persecuting him, but he may have more to fear from the blogosphere as he acquires more and more of the very characteristics that hitherto defined their 'enemy'.

What are the forces which seem to be driving the blogosphere, Mike Arrington and the MSM into a three-way head-on collision?

Wasn't business blogging supposed to lead to positive changes like transparency, engagement and a more democratic business and media environment?

Doesn't this whole thing look like yet another fundamentalist battle zone? 

The hidden issues

In search of some way of reconciling the warring factions (i.e., Arrington, his audience and his adversaries) we called on a leading psycho-social expert to offer his perspective.

Bruce Irvine, is a clinical psychologist specializing in organisational problems who also happens to be Director of the Grubb Institute of Human Behavior.

Bruce shares with us some thoughts about what can happen when competing social groups each claim to have a monopoly on virtue and truth.

He challenges our assumptions about so-called 'revolutionary movements' like the blogosphere.

He discusses how these kinds of high-profile dramatic conflicts have a powerful tendency to work against each party's aspirations and prevent social change from occurring.