Frances Bell’s Blog

Codes of Ethics. He has been talking about codes being fixed rules, and the tension between developing a personal code of ethics and following someone else’s. That is a very good point but not the whole story I think. The issue I wanted to raise has not been picked up from my comments there so my response is to make my comments here in my blog.
That made me think about why I decided to continue this post on my own blog and link back to it.
Nancy White’s excellent series of posts on Blog Communities helped me think this through, particularly the last one that showed aspects of blog-centric, topic-centric and Community-centric blog communities.
Perhaps a blog-centric approach fits with someone who emphasises their own individual ethics whereas in a community-centric approach the collective are willing to subscribe to a shared set of norms.  I am feeling that there is more to it than this though - even in a community-centric approach there could be power differences as stark as in a blog-centric one.
I think that to understand the nature of a given community it would be very useful to know how norms are derived and developed.