In this newsweek article, Keith Jenkins writes about race and blogging:

“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.”

Apparently the Technorati Top 100 is dominated by white males who–guess what–link to other white males. Of course, Keith Jenkins’ point is an obvious fallacy regardless of the facts because when I or any blogger sees Good Content (TM) out there, we just link to it! There’s no check to make sure that they too are a white male. So it’s not really an exclusive white men’s club so much as just another stochastic process that happens to have non-inclusive trends.

It’s not the only blogosphere problem. The A-list blogs are so uniformally classist, elitist that the rest of us smaller blogs are just caught up in the stuggle. The internet is like old France all over again–racism, classism, and then revolution.

Update:

Maybe what we should do is have an A-lister linking boycott, take them off our blogrolls, off our old posts, remove them from our whole site for a few months. I wonder what that would to equalize blogging power. It certainly would have the Google chaos of a revolution…

Read more at www.utopianhell.com/index.php?p=206 and www.pamspaulding.com/weblog/2005/03/newsweek-blogging-beyond-mens-club.html

4 Responses to “Blogs & Diversity”

1. Astarte says:

   3/15/2005 at 1:45 pm

   I’ve never linked to any blog that has ads, and so-called A-List blogs have ads. They also create ads for themselves to drive trafic to their blogs so that they can sell more stuff.

   But, really … if you want to try talking about something *other* than the same few subjects the A-Lists basically link to with little actual discourse, then turning off their noise is a good place to start.

   My prediction, of course, is that their little ecosystem will remain, regardless of what we do. However, by refusing to be the equivalent of plankton in *their* ecosystem, we can evolve off and build our *own* ecosystem that is much higher quality.

   Now *that’s* a revolution.

   Reply
2. Elliott Bäck says:

   3/15/2005 at 9:29 pm

   Personally, I have no problem with the ads that particular blogs run. We all have hosting to pay for, and as long as the ads are mostly secondary to the purpose of the blog, and don’t distract from the content, I’m fine with it. It’s hard, though, to fit them into your layout without distracting everyone!

   Reply
3. Zeke says:

   3/16/2005 at 4:04 pm

   White male blogs? YES! I need to pick up this story, thanks for the tip Elliot

   Reply
4. diversitygirl says:

   3/20/2007 at 6:07 pm

   But the question is: How does one separate the “white male” bloggers from the diverse ones? Not all A-list blogs are of the white male variety and certainly not all blogs that appear to be written by white male bloggers are actually by white male elitist types. Non-whites can be as elitist as the whitest of the A-list ruling class.

   The popularity of blogging, in the first place, stems from the opportunity of expressing one’s views behind a veil of anonymity. For instance, I could hide behind a gender and race that I feel would fit what my blog is about and no one would be the wiser to know it was a mere girl of fifteen and of Asian American origin ranting against Blacks and Hispanics. But then I might not be a girl of fifteen and Asian American at all.

   Think about it…

   Reply