Answer: They are both dominated at the top by white men. That fact, which seems obvious when one thinks about it, is one of the reasons that this blog got started. Just think back to the bloggers who were (or weren’t) invited to the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Newsweek expounds:
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.”
But WHY? The Blogosphere at face would seem to be the ideal example of a meritocracy. If your writing sucks you’ll get no readers. If you don’t like what someone writes then either move on or start your own blog. THIS blog exploited the fact that there weren’t many South Asian American blogs providing YOU with what YOU wanted to read.
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.”
The top-down mainstream media have to some degree found the will and the means to administer such care. 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 fineâexcept inaction. “You can’t wait for it to just happen,” he says. Appropriately enough, the best ideas rely on individual choices. MacKinnon is involved in a project called Global Voices, to highlight bloggers from around the world. And at the Harvard conference, Suitt challenged people to each find 10 bloggers who weren’t male, white or English-speakingâand link to them. “Don’t you think,” she says, “that out of 8 million blogs, there could be 50 new voices worth hearing?” Definitely. Now let’s see if the blogosphere can self-organize itself to find them.
I don’t completely agree with Suitt’s rationale. I think the dominance of white male bloggers has more to do with like-minded people linking to like-minded people: the echo chamber effect (and the reason that most blogs provide such hollow arguments). It just so happens that often times white men think like other white men, just as men of other races may think of certain issues in the same perspective. The other fact is that minorities (in this country) have less access to the internet than whites, and so it’s not entirely surprising that you see more white bloggers at the top. As for the lack of women bloggers at the top, I have no clue. Except for the tabloidish reporting of Gawker and Wonkette, there seems to be a vacuum. I figured that this would be an issue which would invoke a few cents from a large number of readers.
