Diversity in the Blogosphere

[Is there some rule as to what is an inappropriately long comment to a post? I apologize if this is a bit much.]

First, I think you guys did a really nice job. It was interesting to listen to the discussion and you made some good observations about why blogs do offer the potential for something not possible using other communication media.

I would have addressed a couple of points somewhat differently (but I wasn’t the one live on the air). I note these points here not as criticism (as I said, you did a really nice job discussing various issues), but simply to move the discussion from the radio show into the blogosphere.

1) A listener asked whether there are blogs that aggregate different perspectives on an issue. Both Henry and Eugene suggested that this does not occur much in the blogosphere. Although it may be true that “blogs” per se do not do this often, there are Web sites out there that present the various sides of issues, they are just not necessarily called blogs. I realize the show was about blogs, but where/how do we draw the line? I’m thinking about sites like http://www.e-thepeople.org . There are also blog aggregators of sort that point to blogs of different stripes equally and at the same hierarchical level, so to speak, although I realize those pointers are not necessarily to posts on the same issue. Moreover, during campaign seasons there are sites that show you where different candidates come down on an issue (example: issues2000.org). Again, not blogs per se, but online resources and in some cases also interactive.

2) Regarding the potential fragmenting role of blogs in the political realms both of you seemed to suggest that there is definitely potential for that. It is a tricky question. It is hard to say whether in this day and age of talk radio representing very particular sides blogs are really doing that much *more* to fragment people into isolated groups. One of the challenges of answering this question is that there is not that much “before” data on fragmentation so it is hard to say whether blogs are really *changing* things for the worse per se (”worse” depending on your take on the issue).

Overall, both of you (or all three of you may be more appropriate:) did a very nice job, good show!

The first-mover advantage doesn’t seem to me something that established bloggers should lament. Nor does “a level playing field for all forms of opinion” sound like a worthy ideal. Should evil ideas be given the same credence and attention as constructive ones? The blogosphere, as I see it, is a fluid crucible of argumentation. Bloggers help sort out the credible from the nonsense. Barriers to entry into this marketplace of ideas are INCREDIBLY low. If certain demographic groups feel/are underrepresented, there is nothing to stop them from becoming part of the process. Whether anyone cares is another subject altogether.

“Certain issues get discussed to death; others are systematically overlooked.” How could this not be so?

Kos?

I have to take issue with the idea that blogs are fragmenting political opinion. Because I do not subscribe to right wing publications, watch television, or listen to talk radio, blogs are my main source for right wing opinion. Visiting Volokh, Bainbridge, Southern Appeal, Jane Galt, et al is quick and easy. You get the intelligent conservative/libertarian take on a lot of issues without having to wade through hours of nonsense on FOX News or Limbaugh. Without blogs most of my information would be mainstream media or leftist sources with an ocassional browsing through the National Review at the public library. I think most people do the same. I’m guessing that the bloggers at Crooked Timber engage right wing opinions to a much greater extent than before they began blogging.

There needs to be less anonymity in the blogosphere. I want to know whether I’m reading a second rate academic that no one would pay attention to but for the internet, or a self educated know it all dilettante :>)

Two Thoughts:
1) Worrying about whether popular bloggers are overwhelmingly white/male seems to me a bit about worrying about whether popular ice cream is vanilla or chocolate (or whether model railroaders are white, female, male, or anything else). Popular bloggers are popular because people like to read them, and people like to read blogs because they enjoy it (just like other people like to play with model trains). Suggesting that it is ‘problematic’ that people like certain things (vanilla ice cream, white bloggers, model railroads, whatever) strikes me as absurd, and subject to extremely dangerous solutions (obligate blogg readers to read certain things? Obligate people to like reading black female political statements?)
2) Your response is, no doubt, that political blogs are different from ice cream, or model railroading, because they have a political impact on society. But alot of things have a political impact on society. Is it a ‘problem’ that book best-sellers tend to be written by people of a certain color or gender? Or is it simply that readers tend to read what they want to read, and the writers that provide popular writing tend to succeed? Is it a ‘problem’ that people tend to vote for the people they want to vote for, or watch the commentary that they want to watch, or listen to the radio broadcasters that they want to listen to? The only ‘problem’ I can think of is if people want to listen to broadcasters other than the ones you would choose if you could force them to choose. In essence, a problem for the little dictator.
The entire question presupposes some kind of centralized management that, if it were only changed, would allow for a different (better) racial/gender makeup of the blogosphere and thus society wouldn’t be as fragmented/divisive or something. As someone else said, starting a blog is frighteningly easy. Blog readers tend to be ‘voting with their feet’ and reading what they want to read. I’m just not sure why, amongst adults, this is even an issue.

Steve

The question, “Are most bloggers white males?” isn’t the real question that’s being asked — it’s: “Are most bloggers THAT WE CARE ABOUT white males?” — “we” being the dominant media.

There are perhaps 10 million people who keep weblogs on the internet. Many thousands are published, for example, by Asians who don’t write in English. Their blogs are unreadable by most American radio program hosts. There are several associations of black American bloggers — and a number of prominent ones (Ambra Nykol, La Shawn Barber, Baldilocks) are women. Most blogs have nothing to do with public policy. Go to xanga.com, see thousands of blogs written by teenagers about, well, teenager stuff.

But the very small fraction of a percent of the blogosphere that the media pays attention to are published by a tight little cluster of mostly conservative white males, or another tight little cluster of liberal activists — all of whom link to each other.

The question posed by host reeks of hubris.

I’m not sure that path-dependence applies to the topical predilections of bloggers to the degree that you suggest. If someone emerges with a fresh, original voice on a topic of broad interest, there’s no reason they cannot get heard and attract an audience. This is especially the case if they not only blog on a topic that is currently underserved by the elite blogosphere, but also on topics that are central to the elite blogosphere. In other words, draw people in by talking about Iraq or Social Security, and then talk about (e.g. Andrew Sullivan) Catholic theology, or gay rights, or whatever other topics you consider underserved.

Scott:
“The question posed by host reeks of hubris.”

Actually, the dialogue as described does not indicate this. Gretchen asked what “we” knew about bloggers – and that could easily have been answered by either guest with some general statistics about bloggers such as you cite. If those statistics were not at hand for the interviewees, too bad. Evidently, Henry punted on the subject.

But *Henry* described the “‘big’ political bloggers” as being white and male. How “big” is defined is a different issue. Most hits? Most links? Most money raised for candidates? Most mentions on CNN Inside Blogs?

The “biggest” bloggers could mean group blogs.

OR simply the tallest and heaviest – which is more likely to be male.

I link to lots of great female political bloggers who I don’t know the color of, although most of them are probably a bit pinkish-beige. Anyway, if there aren’t enough women on your blogrolls, just look around.

What She Said! found lots and lotsa female blogs – over 500 last time they counted.

http://whatshesaid.the-goddess.org/

Progressive Women’s web ring is here (178 listed):
http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=carla;action=list

Belle blogs has 38 listed:
http://www.ringsurf.com/netring?ring=belleblogs;action=list

There’s Time Goes By, who blogs on ageism and social security:

http://www.timegoesby.net/

Helena Cobban’s Just World News:

http://www.justworldnews.org/

There’s pinko feminist hellcat:
http://pinkofeministhellcat.typepad.com/pinko_feminist_hellcat/

Lauren’s feministe:
http://feministe.us/blog/

Ellen at TBOP:
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/003623.html#3623

Greek goddess Echidne:
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/

A snarky cat:
http://www.slyfelinos.com/slyblog/

The women of feminist blogs (aggregate of posts):
http://www.feministblogs.org/

And here’s a nice transexual blogger:
http://musingsonlifelawandgender.typepad.com/life_law_gender/

So, is that enough diversity for y’all? Seek and ye shall find, you don’t have to just read the “Big Boys”.

C. 12 “1) Worrying about whether popular bloggers are overwhelmingly white/male seems to me a bit about worrying about whether popular ice cream is vanilla or chocolate”

C. 21 “If I visit my local ice cream shop I expect they have 20 tubs of Vanilla in the freezer and only one of Rum Raisin.”

The word these two commenters omit (or are unaware of) is *power*. The reasons ethnic majority women and members of ethnic minority groups are radically underrepresented in “elite” groups have little to do with the reasons why there are more vanilla tubs in the freezer (I am not prepared to say there is no relation at all, as in both cases, moulded preferences are involved). There’s a massive scholarly literature on all this but I accept that people who hold to the Ice-Cream Model of Political Representation and Power won’t be interested in it

Note many of the top power-bloggers are not unknown, anonymous, entities of cyberspace. They show up at conventions (both blog and political), and people meet them in various contexts. Anyone who is not White Male, stands out noticeably (Oliver Willis, who is a prominent leftist political blogger, and also a black male, talks about this occasionally).

The reason the discussion is important is because there’s a lot of propaganda about blogging being a pure meritocracy. Thus, some pundits conclude that if there are large power imbalances, along gender and racial lines, well, that just proves that white males are naturally more meritorious (paging Lawrence Summers at Harvard …).

To show that the power in the blogosphere is very similar to elsewhere is important social discussion, even if perhaps it’s obvious to most commentors here.

“The left is a lot stronger and diverse in the blogosphere than it is in the mainstream media.”

The MSM is saturated with leftist views. That’s why its numbers are dropping in all of the polls measuring public trust.

Note to any reader of this thread who is inclined to react “Yes, of course, hierarchy, inequality, oligarchy, ho-hum”. It’s not that this is new – rather, it’s ongoing, here THE SAME AS everywhere else.

Some of the comments are all the proof you should need.

I think Scott Ferguson nailed it. There’s a whole lot of people who keep blogs or journals in other languages than English, write from other countries than the US, wether they’re in Asia or Latin America or Europe or Arab countries or anywhere else, and even those who write more about politics, strictly or loosely defined, write about things that either have little to do with the internal US political debate or are not easily fitted into how that political debate is framed.

Then, there’s all the people who really do not feel any urge to keep a weblog or journal online.

Yet, whenever these demographic/sociological questions about “the blogosphere” are raised on the “big” US weblogs, the implied assumptions are always:
– the “blogosphere” we’re interested in is exclusively anglophone
– within it, we really only pay attention to US bloggers
– within that group, we really only pay attention to US bloggers who blog about politics
– within that category, we really only pay attention to those who write about politics in the way the political debate is framed at institutional or mainstream level in the US
– within that category, we really only pay attention to those bloggers who participate in debate by citing the media or other bloggers and engage in back-and-forth so that circles of discussion on common grounds are created, blogrolls replenished, awards given, media mentions, and so on.

Is it any surprise it all boils down to white, male, American, wealthy, educated?

That’s the same people you have “at the top” in any other area, politics, work, media, etc.

(This, regardless of the actual quality of content and interest of the different discussions in that blogosphere.)

Whenever something is already implicitely defined in such narrow terms, it’s a bit blind to wonder why it’s not more inclusive. It doesn’t have to be inclusive, of course. (If “inclusive” is even the right word). But then, you shouldn’t use excessively generic terms like “blogosphere” either, at least not without qualifying it as English-speaking, predominantly US-based, political, popular, mainstream, etc.. Because that is most definitely not taken for granted.

“My floundering aside, I should note that Gretchen Helfrich who hosts Odyssey, did far better at asking interesting and searching questions about the blogosphere than anyone else who has interviewed me on the topic before (or who I’ve heard interviewing other people). That’s in part a function of the hour long format, which allows for more expansive discussion, but only in part.”

It’s because most shows aren’t geared towards actual discussion, but are more about helping the guests convey their talking points.

Thus, Talk of the Nation might invite someone from Club For Growth and someone from AARP, and lets each lay out their predictable established cases without actually discussing anything or informing the listener.

Odyssey, on the other hand, tends to invite people who aren’t actively involved in pushing something or lobbying Congress, and chooses topics which don’t help do that. The discussions are at a higher level which also helps cut down on guests trying to move their political ball or sell something.

It’s funny, I thought the blogosphere was dominated by middle-class Indian men and pseudonymous white female English professors who all seem to call themselves “[Something] Girl” or “[Something]PhD.”

Where are all these white male bloggers everyone is referring to? Kos? I thought Kos was Latino? Anyway, I’m having trouble finding these reported white male bloggers via google. Do they really get much traffic?

[Small joke… I’m with Joejoejoe: the diversity is there, if you’re willing to look for it.]

Henry – the paper we did for APSA last year found that the bloggers with the highest rankings were indeed mostly white, male, and highly educated.

But that might be changing. The Large Mammal category of bloggers are quickly rising in popularity and are much more diverse.

John “Juan” Cole is obviously a quintessential white male. He even has his picture on his blog.

functional, he’s a white hispanic male, so he doesn’t count. ;-)

Y’all are missing a big part of the picture: economics. How does a blog get to be “big”? It has to discuss something interesting, in an interesting way, and there need to be lots of posts. Preferrably several a day.

Poor people in the US, and more so outside the US, are less likely to have a computer or internet access at all, so the blog population skews slightly richer than the US population at large, and significantly richer than the population of other countries where there are “big” bloggers.

The more important factors, at least in the US, is the need to write well and post frequently. Poor people in the US often go to atrocious schools, and don’t learn to write in a way which anyone else would voluntarily read. (They’re also frequently less confident in their writing abilities, and thus are less likely to start to blog.)

But much more important than that is the ability to spend time reading a lot of other articles, and spend a significant time thinking about and writing about what one reads. Having the sort of on-job leisure time, particularly with an internet connection and incurious supervisors, which make frequent posting possible, is a preserve of the office-professional class, which includes academia. That class is significantly wealthier than the American population as a whole, and skews whiter.