Steven Levy has a good article in the Bulletin (and in Newsweek) this week looking at the way the A-list blogging tribe has become something akin to an old-style (white) men's club with members linking to each other furiously and all-but ignoring the millions of non-white, female and non-american and third world bloggers who are often somewhat condescendingly referred to as the 'long tail'.
As many of these A-listers are the same guys who sprout the loudest about the revolutionary nature of blogging (which is going to transform the media, political and corporate worlds you live in) it seems like a great paradox to me and one that I will cover in my blogtalk downunder paper on the problems of maturity: can blogging retain its revolutionary fervour?.
- Will we have to introduce affirmative action laws to adjust the biases in blogosphere?
- Why is the market for ideas and opinion so skewed in ways we would find unaccpetable in our offline lives?
- Will this bias stifle the emergence of blogging and undermine its credibility?
Here are some excerpts from Levy's piece:
At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best journalism of the 21st century". The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine (a sister publication of Newsweek). "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to the point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."
After the comment was posted, a couple of the women at the conference – bloggers MacKinnon and Halley Suitt – looked around and saw that there weren't many other women in attendance. Nor were the faces yapping about the failings of Big Media representative of the human quiltwork one would see in the streets of Cambridge or New York City, let alone overseas.
They were, however, representative of the top 100 blogs according to the web site Technorati – a list dominated by bigmouths of the white-male variety. Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grassroots phenomenon. The perks of alpha bloggers – voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes – are, in theory, bequeathed by a market-driven merit system. The idea is that the smartest, the wittiest and the most industrious in finding good stuff will simply rise to the top, by virtue of a self-organising selection process. So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous?
It appears that some clubbiness is involved. Suitt puts it more bluntly: "It's white people linking to other white people!" (A link from a popular blog is this medium's equivalent to a Super Bowl ad.) Suitt attributes her own high status in the blogging world to her conscious decision to "promote myself among those on the A list".
Responses to Levy include Chris Nolan who has a long thoughtful response of about eight points the first three of which are:
1)This medium was first taken up by techies. Most of them are men. It's not worth going into the statistics on men and women in tech, and the reasons and whyfors. There are more men, that's all you need to know for this conversation.
2)Those men prefer to link and read men like them. As it was in the beginning so shall it ever be. When they wonder where the women bloggers are what they're really saying is "I don’t read any women bloggers."
3)Even though the "blogosphere" has gotten much larger, most of these men are still reading the guys they started out with three years ago., linking to them and talking among themselves.
Personally, I think the blogosphere is still far too dominated by geeks and gadgetary.
Rebecca MacKinnon also has a good response. She is not worried about gender balances in A-list blogging but she is concerned about the capacity for otherwise for Americans to think beyond their small part of the globe:
I left my mainstream media job out of frustration with the assumption by CNN and other U.S. broadcasters that news about most of the world's population is uninteresting to Americans. What attracted me to social media and blogging was the potential to expose Americans to a more global conversation. If the blogosphere winds up proving the assumptions of my former MSM bosses to be true - that the majority of Americans are indeed incapable of caring about the rest of the world in any sustainable way - then shame on us all.
I would not turn to Newsweek for my information about blogsophere.
http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2005/03/we-must-integrate-blogoshere.html
Posted by: Alice Marshall | 17 March 2005 at 03:26 PM