Why Aren't There Any Non-White Non-Male Bloggers?
Newsweek's Steven Levy has a new column entitled "Blogging Beyond the Men's Club." The heading asks, "Since anyone can write a Weblog, why is the blogosphere dominated by white males?"
Gee, nobody has ever asked that before, so the blogosphere has no answers. Thanks, mainstream media for giving us simple bloggers something to think about.
Okay, while it's not an original question, it's worth asking now and again, since it usually prompts the response, "Maybe I should get of my rut and read some blogs other than InstaPundit, Powerline Blog, and BuzzMachine from time to time." And now that the mainstream media is asking the question, maybe it will prompt journalists covering technology and stuff to contact bloggers other than Glenn Reynolds, that Hindrocket guy, and Jeff Jarvis whenever they do stories about blogging.
Nah, the rut is good.
Anyway, Levy's piece pissed off Jeff Jarvis, who makes some good points, but also some stupid ones, like:
First, what's wrong with being a whilte male? I'm white and male. Not much I can do about it. Not much I want to do about it. I'm sure as hell not going to apologize for it. I'm white. I'm male. I blog. You got a problem with that? Tough.
It sounds like somebody is taking Levy's comment about the homogeneity of the top-rung bloggers kind of personally. (Jeff, you may be one of the top 100 "bigmouths of the white-male variety" that Levy was talking about, but you aren't really the boss of the blogosphere, and so you don't have to bristle at every criticism made about blogging.)
And Jeff's response #3 is kind of inane too:
Third, anyone can blog. Anyone. If you're not white or not male or not American or not powerful or not rich or not anything, you can still blog. This is not like Big Media, where there's a gate to keep and a ceiling to hit. This is a wide-open medium where anyone can blog.
But since Levy's thesis is , "So why, when millions of blogs are written by all sorts of people, does the top rung look so homogeneous?," this really isn't a much of a response.
And how about Jarvis's response #6?
Sixth, so if there aren't enough unwhite and unmale bloggers blogging, am I supposed to stop? Is it my fault? No, it's not.
Jeff, honey, nobody said that there aren't enough unwhite and unmale bloggers blogging, only that the top bloggers, who are predominantly white males, get more attention than the rest of the blogsophere combined. So, don't stop blogging -- just encourage people to read other bloggers instead of you. ;-)
Jeff goes on to say:
Steven Levy called me before he wrote his column and I said much of this. I said it is a mistake to presume that the blogosphere has a "diversity problem" just because the blogs you read aren't diverse (hell, there are eight million of them -- so find some new blogs to read;
Levy writes that "the perks of alpha bloggers" include "voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, [and] White House press passes." So, if these perks are just going to the big dogs of blogging, then the fact that Steven Levy calls people like Jeff Jarvis instead of, say, ThatColoredFellasweblog or Suburban Guerilla, demonstrates that Levy is part of the problem that he's addressing.
So, yes, Levy should find some new blogs to read. As should the rest of the mainstream media. (Oh, and MSM, please note that Wonkette, while cute and funny, can't be counted as the "diverity" blogger on every panel, TV show, or column about blogging.)
And Jarvis makes part of a good point with this:
When Halley Suitt and Rebecca MacKinnon suggested at the Harvard confab that we should all find new voices and link to them and blogroll them, I agreed because I love to find new voices.
Note that I said new voices. Not unmale voices. Not unwhite voices. New voices. It's the voice that matters. It's the person that matters. It's the message that matters. Not the race or the gender.
But unless one is actively seeking "new voices," then will probably stick with the voices that feel comfortable, and the messages that that agrees with one what already believes -- and if one is a white male, the voices that feel comfortable will tend to be the white males ones.
So, I commend Jarvis for seeking out new voices and blogrolling them, and I hope he continues to do this even when Lebanese bloggers are no longer the flavor of the week.
Oh, and Levy would no doubt commend Jarvis too, since he seemed to have advocated basically the same thing:
But is there a way to promote diversity online, given the built-in decentralization of the blog world? Jenkins, whose comment started the discussion, says that any approach is fine—except inaction. "You can't wait for it to just happen," he says. Appropriately enough, the best ideas rely on individual choices.
So, in conclusion, after reading the remarks of both Levy and Jarvis, I have to say that they're not that far apart in their views -- which isn't unexpected, since they're both white males.
But Michelle Malkin (who is pissed off at Maureen Dowd, not Steven Levy) isn't white or male. And she actually provides links to a bunch of female bloggers, so I commend her too. (And since I am included on the list, I commend her more than I commend Jarvis.)
Oh, and speaking of diverse voices, Rosie O'Donnell has a blog now. While I don't advocae paying attention to celebrities just because they're celebrities, Rosie's blog isn't what I expected, and I liked it. So, I guess we should let her join Jeff Jarvis's blogosphere, even though she's not male or straight.
4:27:56 AM 
|
