Posted November 27th, 2007, in: New Media| Technology| Web 2.0

Thanks, Mike Hedge.

Over at a new Blog called ‘Collective Thoughts on Social Media,’ Marty writes
in a post called Gilded Crown of the Hypocritical Social Media Czar

“The sheer propensity of mainstream humans to congregate in targetable, virulent, and roaming electronic social packs has resulted in spawning a beautiful new breed of working class public relations heroes: “The Social Media Czars.”

A social media Czar is a true, brilliant, and presumably selfless influencer whose authority was born out of peoples’ revolt, acute intuition, and holistic intent. Nobody questions him or her. Nobody would dare question them. The problem is that some (not all) social media power brokers are mob-bred mercenaries who are at least partially full of shit.  “

Talk about a Rant. That’s great.

The Blog Itself seems to be put together mostly by people who have worked in SEO and SMO, which makes the post itself more of a “C’mon, we all do it!!” than a straight-forward “Bloggers are just as corruptible as anyone else.”

I recommend reading the whole thing for yourself.  There’s some spot-on observations in there.

It brings up the question (again):

“Just because a system can be gamed, does that mean it should be gamed?”

the inevetible answer to this question is usually something like:

“Only in a way that I agree with.  If you’re gaming the system to promote ideas or products I don’t like, you’re an asshole, but if I like what you’re promoting, then cheating is OK with me.”

This obviously spills over into a debate about ethics on the Web, if you believe there is such a thing.  I’m not implying that the point of view of the article is an unethical one, I’m just saying that it’s a debate.  It’s a complicated topic with many sides to it.

Ethics.

Are non-Web ethics any easier to navigate?