Ethnocentrism and Blogger Diversity

I heard about this first last week, but it’s been paraded about again on MSNBC that there is a “diversity problem” in the blogging community.

So what’s the problem? Apparently, Rebecca MacKinnon and Halley Suitt feel that the blogging world is dominated by white American males. They even went so far as to challenge people “to each find 10 bloggers who [aren’t] male, white or English-speaking—and link to them,” since “Don’t you think that out of 8 million blogs, there could be 50 new voices worth hearing?” Sounds reasonable, at first.

Supposedly, this was all sparked by a comment made by one Keith Jenkins, specifically:

“My fear is that the overwelmingly white and male American blogosphere, hell bent (in some quarters) on replacing the current ranks of professional journalists with themselves, will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one.”

Let’s see. Rebecca MacKinnon is originally from Temple, Arizona. American? Check. Halley Suitt hails from Boston. American? Check. Keith W. Jenkins is New York City-born. American? Check.

I can’t help but find it funny that Suitt and MacKinnon have apparently mistaken Jenkins’ complaint as a complaint that there are too many American bloggers. In fact, I read the issue to be specifically a race-gender issue, framed entirely in the context of American blogging only. Nowhere does Jenkins discuss the international scene in his comment. Yet MacKinnon and Suitt are talking about the blogosphere as a whole, using Jenkin’s argument to fuel a call for “greater diversity.”

It’s ironic in a way that Jenkins was stating some fear of the minority American voice being lost in the greater blog shuffle, yet two American women took it upon themselves to raise it as a call to arms for the international scene. It isn’t so surprising, perhaps, when you realize that MacKinnon is “involved in a project called Global Voices, to highlight bloggers from around the world.” In any case, the ultimate effect is to call for greater dilution of the top-end of popular blogs by the injection of international blogs. While I’m all for plurality, this will make the minority American blogger even less visible than before.

It’s odd; world-wide, whether you search for Japanese bloggers or Chinese bloggers or French bloggers – they all come down to being male-dominated. Try it yourself sometime – but don’t limit yourself to browsing “English-only” blogs. Learn how to find the “About me” links irrespective of language.

By and large, the blogging world is dominated by figures who are already famous offline, or by those they’ve selected. MacKinnon, Ito, Reynolds, Wheaton – you’ll find name after name with some sort of pre-blogging status, seasoned with a dash of the occasional oblivion-to-fame story (most of whom shot up on the basis of links from the famous). It’s the way of the world. I would propose that the blogging world is more than sufficiently diverse, but so heavily stratified that the diverse working-class voices will remain in the background. The supposed online “lack of diversity” is really just the same offline patriarchal, capitalist divides reflected in the digital world. After all, you can’t have some construction worker crashing Wozniak’s Super Bowl Party.

In summary, fuck the a-list bloggers. If you have something interesting to say, say it and they will come.