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March 17, 2005
The Gendered Politics of Blogs?
In the March 21 Newsweek, Steven Levy wrote an article about Blogging Beyond the Men's Club:
March 21 issue - 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.
Does the blogosphere have a diversity problem?
In the March 17 Alternet, Chris Nolan (a female) writes about Ten Reasons for Too Few Female Bloggers:
1. This medium was first taken up by techies. Most of them aremen. 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 to 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. There's talk of broader horizons, but it's pretty much that: Talk. Glenn Reynolds, however, is an exception to this trend. And since he got slapped around last month, Kevin Drum has started to link to more women. Josh Marshall rarely links to women writers. Dave Winer is also stingy.
etc etc .. read the rest online...
Posted by shade at March 17, 2005 12:01 PM