Head over to the picture gallery of bloggers at Cre8d.
Rachel asks if you can you put a name to the faces.
What a great idea, I didn’t know most of the faces, but I know their blogs.
What an interesting snapshot of the god-blogs.
Mostly young, male, white.
Does that mean men are more comfortable in this medium?
Is blogging a safe place for males to chatter and debate?
BuzzMachine thinks the NY Times peice on gender is a crock.
: What a crock today’s NY Times delivers: A story that tries to trot out page 476 from the journalism cliche book and relate it to blogs: Are blogs male-dominated?
That kind of quotathink does not work here for two simple reasons:
(1) Anyone of any gender who wants to start a blog can. Nobody will stop them. So you can’t argue that some bigger power structure — blog executives, the old blog boys club — is stopping them. The only thing stopping nonbloggers from blogging is themselves. That, after all, is the whole point of this new medium: It’s anybody’s. It’s everybody’s.
(2) There are many, many great women bloggers. I don’t need to start listing them. You know them.
Is the god-blogosphere divided by gender, income, education?
Is this a bloggers year-book? The picture gallery already has a parody….ar arr arrr. That is perspective. (Now, if DashHouse could just find a picture of the unknown comic…..)
Does it mean that the technology is available to a certain income level in our societies?
It is odd to see these pictures after reading a pessimistic rant about blogging at FutureMargins.
Is Fred Peatross correct? Are there basically four reasons people blog?
I’m not pessimistic about this medium, and I don’t think it is just a testosterone domain. I think blogging is still being birthed, and is a dynamic, creative field for anyone who choses to participate.
UPDATE: Living Room surveyed over 300 blogs…(Whew. I’ve done that before so I can appreciate the eyestrain) He answers some of the questions raised above and gives some accurate stats. Since men tend to debate and women tend to dialogue our observations make a great deal of sense. The door swings both ways. Although men make up the majority of god-bloggers, every blogger can make the choice no matter what gender they are to be inclusive and respectful of communication differences. There is great potential for blogging to continue to provide that.
Yeah, people blog for those four reasons. But I think there’s more. I, for one, blog to continue some conversations and start others. I also post random stuff I find on the ‘net that I find interesting that I think people who read my daily stuff would find interesting. And yes, I “share.” Unfortunately, my interlocutors are a bit passive (if they are there at all).
I think your other questions are insightful. I have purposely not published a picture of myself so as not to reveal “age” and “color” so directly. Better to keep people guessing.
I think that the “god-blogosphere” is made up of those who have the money to own computers, the computer literacy (read “education”) to publish through blogger or somesuch other publishing tool and the leisure (permitted by some level of affluence) to read, ruminate and respond to life via blogs.
I wonder if some bloggers are textual, and some are textual/visual.
When the gender issue has come up in my experience this past year, it has been about an individual or two, and quite oppostional and reactive.
It has not been explored much with this specific god-blog group.
I agree, squeezing bloggers into four reasons doesn’t work, Fred’s final question is a good one, and one that has been asked before….
Economics…some of us blow that out of the water.
All I have to blog with, has been a gift, I hold all things loosely, so I guess I’m not the norm in the affluence department. I’m not alone in that.
I am genuinely interested why an individual blogs too. Blog on!
Space doesn’t allow one to share all the reasons and possible reasons bloggers blog…so I listed four realizing there could be more. But the 3rd one (Need to share. There are some who genuinely like to “share,” and this is one way) in the list is positive and covers a large number of bloggers.
Hi Fred:
I hope you’ll get positive reasons from others in your comments section. Blog on!
I guess I agree with the idealists: there’s nothing stopping anyone (with access to the technology) from blogging.
Perhaps the percentages are reflective of those involved in the Computer Science related fields… university CS departments are notoriously white and male.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way!!!