Oliver Willis recently took a poke at the hype that threatens to wash over the blogging phenomenon:
During one of the Saturday sessions a member of the audience referred to the assembled crowd as “utopia”. Now, yes, I loved the blog camaraderie but quite frankly I don’t want to be the only black person in utopia. I was the only black person in that room, and was one of a few minorities. I’m not whining about that, but simply stating the fact that a technology that is mostly the pursuit of upper middle class white males does diddly to change the real world. I’m a geek through-and-thorough but when I hear tooth gnashing about issues like copyright as if they were the most important issue in the world – it tells me that the blog world is somewhat out of touch.
First, thank goodness someone is trying to keep people from having their heads explode. Blogs are neat, but they are not a panacea.
However, the Saturday he is talking about is the BloggerCon get-together, hosted at Harvard. The chances that the group assembled there represented the mainstream blogger was very near to zero. The group assembled was very much the elite of the community. As such, it is disappointing that Mr. Willis was the only black man in sight, but I don’t know that this is representative of everyone who blogs. So the real question might be “why does the elite of the blogging world look so much like the elite in other social groupings?” In other words, I don’t know that this is as much a condemnation of the blogosphere as a recognition that it tends to reinscribe an existing social order, perhaps with a sidecar of white-male geekiness thrown strangely toward the top.
Having recently been accused of being a bloghyper myself, I don’t want to be step into the role of defending of the technology. On the other hand, I think a more appropriate question might be: where is the conference for the average blogger?
BloggerCon == Bloggers?
Oliver Willis recently took a poke at the hype that threatens to wash over the blogging phenomenon:
First, thank goodness someone is trying to keep people from having their heads explode. Blogs are neat, but they are not a panacea.
However, the Saturday he is talking about is the BloggerCon get-together, hosted at Harvard. The chances that the group assembled there represented the mainstream blogger was very near to zero. The group assembled was very much the elite of the community. As such, it is disappointing that Mr. Willis was the only black man in sight, but I don’t know that this is representative of everyone who blogs. So the real question might be “why does the elite of the blogging world look so much like the elite in other social groupings?” In other words, I don’t know that this is as much a condemnation of the blogosphere as a recognition that it tends to reinscribe an existing social order, perhaps with a sidecar of white-male geekiness thrown strangely toward the top.
Having recently been accused of being a bloghyper myself, I don’t want to be step into the role of defending of the technology. On the other hand, I think a more appropriate question might be: where is the conference for the average blogger?
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