Who are we bloggers accountable to? I imagine two families of accountability models when it comes to blogs.

Professional models: Journalism vs. tabloid gossip. Academia vs. plagiarism. Footnotes, cited sources, and the lack thereof. Attribution and cheating.

Personal models: Named vs. pen named. “In relationship” vs. hyper-individualist. “This is really me” vs. “I’m just playing a game here.” Who is the blogger behind the blog? Do bloggers have to be accountable to readers and other bloggers? And, if so, how should bloggers be held accountable? And to what?

I’m going to go with Aristotle on this one—always a good place for a start in ethics—and propose that there is a golden mean of blog accountability between the extremes on either end.

Let’s start with attribution. The models of attribution used for term papers and journalism have evolved over decades and exist to meet needs specific to those media. Yet we don’t ask for newspapers to use APA style, and we shouldn’t. On the other end of things, it isn’t ethical to steal someone else’s work. Fair enough. But with a new medium, we should expect intellectual theft to take new forms. Take, for example, the spam blogs that steal posts from legitimate blogs in order to make money off Google ads.

Likewise, we should expect attribution to take different forms too. The hyperlink—that clever little tag that makes all blogs possible—changes the scope of what attribution is possible and necessary. Where a footnote might be required in an academic paper, a well placed hyperlink will likely do for a blog. Demanding journalistic or academic forms of accountability will not serve most blogs, nor their readers, well. Thinking that these forms of accountability are accountability shows a lack of imagination.

When we get to personal accountability—blogger to reader and blogger to blogger—ambiguity quickly sets in, chiefly because of the prevalence of pseudonyms. Bloggers choose pen names for many reasons, and a desire to avoid accountability is usually the least among them. Perhaps the most practical reason for pseudo-anonymity is the potential for complications with work, or with getting work. Though it may be tempting to assume that pseudo-anonymous bloggers are motivated solely by self-protection (which is to say, accountability to self), bloggers may also be acting out of a desire to protect work and family.

Though blogging is a hobby, even for most of those who make money from it, the online nature of blogging moves blogging beyond the privacy afforded to most hobbies. Blogging is done in public, even by those who only blog for friends and family, and public accountability is a different animal than private.

While it is tempting at this point to thrust bloggers into one arena or the other, public or private, there is another model available: improv comedy. In improv comedy, the actors stand in public as themselves but also as characters. The audience knows them to be both, and issues of accountability do not arise unless a more conventional ethical accountability is abridged, as in, say, a racist joke. Something of the moral character of the actors will be revealed during the show’s improvisations, but is too much to assume that the actors may thereby be fully known, or even mostly known. The audience may rightly claim, in specific instances, significant moral knowledge of an improv actor, but these instances do not justify a blanket assumption that this will always be the case.

Yet there is an accountability, between the actors and the audience, and between the actors themselves. Together, they create the show. Put differently, without relationships there is no show. Blogging is a collaborative art, even when the blogger is playwright, director, and starring actor. Bloggers who neglect relationships with their collaboration partners risk accountability. Sticking with the improv comedy analogy, there are three ways this can happen:

1. An improv actor who demands the right to step out of character, on stage. An actor whose joke fails should not interrupt the show to explain why it was funny (unless the nature of the audience-actor relationship calls for it). An actor who is booed cannot interrupt to show to tell the audience that she holds a degree in acting and is therefore not to be booed.

2. An audience member who demands an actor step out of character, on stage. An audience member who calls an actor a racial epithet, or who breaks up with an actor who is onstage, violates relationality.

3. An actor who demands that other actors step out of character, on stage. An actor should not get in a fight on stage with another actor about something that has happened off stage. If an actor is unhappy with another actor’s performance, it should be discussed off stage, unless it is urgently aggregious.

In each case someone violates the agreed upon terms of the relationship by crossing relational boundaries.

Other relationships apart from the blog may exist, and here the improv comedy analogy begins to break down. However, the boundaries that govern those other relationships will likely apply on and offline. Whatever the situation, the method of redress is likely simple, and in time, reputation will take care of repeated violators of relationality.