Richard Hall at connexions has a well thought out post on blogrolls.
I think any of us have to blog for awhile before we find the pacing…
As a new blogger, links are a huge deal, and it takes time to adjust.
And the blogosphere isn’t any more static than your neighbourhood is.
Jordon Cooper went through some wild ‘delinking’ experiences.
LivingRoom also went through ‘delinking.’
LivingRoom also did a post recently that showed some heart and understanding of bloggers. We are human, and there are bloggers we admire. He did a great post on blog crushes and linking, allowing us to freely discuss this subject without inflammatory language or mockery.
connexions wonders about our holy huddles.
I’m fascinated by the way that people choose what to put on their “blogroll”, that list of other blogs in a column on the side of the screen. Some people seem to make it a “list of every blog I’ve looked at that I hought was half decent”. Some claim it as a some kind of magnificent endorsement. Others link only the sites they read. i haven’t done any research, but my instinct is that via the blogrolls, blogs are arranged in “clusters”. the clusters have points of contact, even overlap, but broadly speaking a link on the blogroll seems to be an indication of “one of us”. I might be wrong, of course. But if I’m right, I wonder how healthy that is - especially among the God blogs.
My experience of last December is so unique it doesn’t fall under this discussion.
I don’t let someone know I’m rotating my blog roll, nor do I get hurt if I notice I’ve been removed from one. It was a bit more difficult when I first started though. You are learning blog etiquette, now to navigate, how to blog, and how to relate.
Yes, there are a lot of blogs that I’d say are holy huddles and I don’t have a problem most of them, because it depends on their content and how they include or exclude others in posts and in the comments section. There are a lot more coming online that aren’t huddling as the god-blog sub-division matures.
In our lives our social network consists of about 150 people. Think of it as circles inside circles. Over 150 people becomes unmanagable. We get stressed trying to remember the details of the lives of the people we move around with. (information from The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell)
How to Save the World explains.
Gladwell goes on to talk about the magic number 150 as “the maximum number of individuals with whom anyone can have a genuinely social relationship”, or, put another way, “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar”. He argues that the same social span is present in hunter-gatherer societies, in the military, in the most effective business units of decentralized businesses and in many other areas.
Your blog roll does say a lot about you.
connexions doesn’t understand the ‘delinking’ mentality either.
Just occasionally though, you hear of someone who is asking to be taken off a blogroll, perhaps because they don’t approve of the linking site or its owner. I find that very strange. as far as I know, there is no contamination that can be transmitted via a link. There are no “Blogually Transmitted Diseases” that I’m aware of. So I have to admit that I find such requests hard to understand.
I stand by my observation I made the other day.
Teens and 20’s are a time of peer bonding, with strong emotional investments that understandably spill over into blogging. They are also age groups where opinions of self and the larger world are formed, shaped and defended whether they be political, social, religious. It is an age group finding thier place and in their independence bumping up against a larger society. By nature of that they are more ego-centric, and will move in flexible, other oriented directions when they have a sense of safety in their own lives and beliefs. Learning more about themselves and others takes place in the school of hard knocks. There are a rare older few that are emotionally arrested or stuck in this phase of their lives. We meet them in life and we meet them in blogging.
If Jordon and Darren could tell us the age group of the people that asked to be delinked, I suspect they’d be mostly male and in their teens and 20’s.
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I’m sure you’re right about the “teens and twenties” thing BD. The internet does away with alot of the rules of normal conversation because we don’t have the usual clues about who we’re talking to unless we go to the effort of finding them. So i might talk to you in the same way as I talk to a teenage boy, which I suspect I wouldn’t do in the real world. Similarly, I know that there are those who speak to me very differently on the internet than they would in the real world. I’m apt to forget it, so I’m glad of the reminder
I need the reminder too Richard. Often.
In my dealings online the vast majority of teens and 20’s are awesome. Respectful, curious, open, tons of fun, and they enrich my blogging and game time more than I can tell them, and I learn a great deal from them.
Aren’t you a university chaplain along with your myraid of other responsibilities?
Blogging is it’s own world like gaming is in a way.
There are a few bloggers and readers, and a very few, I’ve come across that don’t have wider social skills.
They really think and believe they do have, and hopefully those of us of any demographic that have our PhD in the school of hard knocks can model respect and kindness without to many bruises. Blog on!
Hmmm, good question about males in their 20’s. I am not sure of their age but they were males but a lot were pastor and denomination types that see the world through denominational and theological fences and boundaries. Once outside those boudaries, I think I upset them quite a bit.
Evangelicalism is still defined a bit by who is for us and who is against us. At the local Christian marketplace there is a magazine rack and one of the mags is a sports one that is constantly showing the newest sports star to say he or she is a Christian. Look at all the jubilation when Bono said he was Christian.
I think blogrolls are kind of like that. We link to people thinking we know what they believe but we really don’t. Then we are upset when they don’t turn out to think the way we want them to think. It is kind of bizarre yet a learning process at the same time.
Jordon
Thanks very much for that Jordon.
Why am I not surprised?
At the risk of classifying….if they were male pastors past their 20’s your next observation has merit as does mine.
Emotional development got stuck somewhere and the religious world embraces dualism without thought.
Delinking with flaming explanations is an act of anger, control, fear and hurt.
We can’t own those emotions easily so we rationalize, justifiy, minimize, intellectualize, praise God, pass the ammunition, and fire at will.
Richard Hall’s post is excellent.
Maybe “Blogually Transmitted Diseases” will wind up in a blog dictionary.:^)
I also agree it is a learning experience. Blog on!
Several friends of mine have worked with groups of pastors and religious leaders before. While many are very emotionally stable and mature, they have wondered aloud that many have not matured emotionally and seem stunted.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that many people like that find solice in the church. Heirarchical, male driven (regretably) with clear boundaries. It is when they are moved out of those places our comfort and fences and move out into a world that may be more adequately defined by place markers rather than a clear path, they become angry and irate.
It’s odd, your blog is read by more people in a week then go to most churches. That kind of world is unsettling because it is hard to control and changing. For some people, like Pete Ward who wrote Liquid Church, it is a cool world in which God can do amazing things. For others, they feel as if God can’t do anything to stop the dying world we are leaving behind.
Sorry for the long winded rant!
Pax,
Jordon
Jordon:
A pretty good example of some of what you are saying happened this week at the blog, I took the Red Pill.
Iphy is looking for a church, and quite candidly posted thoughts and feelings about a Sunday visit to a church.
Somehow, the minister found the blog and the post.
I felt really sorry for the guy.
He had trouble handling her opinion.
I Took the Red Pill owned her thoughts and feelings well.
The commenters (male and female) showed reasonable restaint.
The minister tried to interact and his words fell flatter than a punctured helium ballon.
He just dug himself in deeper. It had to hurt.
I honestly believe he didn’t realize how defensive, patriarchial, condescending, judgemental and rigid he was in his communication. Seemed like a nice enough fellow.
Last I saw, he bowed out and invited people to email him. I think that’s probably a safer way for him because email has easier boundaries.
Maybe “Blogually Transmitted Diseases” will wind up in a blog dictionary
Now that would be something!
It has happened to me a number of times now. The details are a little fuzzy now but here is what I remember of three instances.
I’m not exactly sure of the ages of the people - however each time it was a male - two times they were ‘younger’ (20s or 30s) and one time it was a middle aged person.
They were church leaders of different types. The impression I got was that they had initially latched onto my blog and linked to me because they agreed with something I said - but they didn’t really check out what I was doing or who I was. (it was a bit of an impulse linking - not one that came out of a relationship).
The delinking came when I said something or another that didn’t sit right theologically or politically.
Thats life I guess. It initially caused me a little concern (I don’t like to cause conflict) but now it doesn’t really bother me. I’m more interested now in developing relationships with those that read my blog and resourcing others to get into the conversation we have. If in the process people delink or link - its their prerogative.
I need a coffee, its too early to be thinking about this sort of stuff!
Thanks for that Darren…
and good morning to you.
I’m signing off and saying good night.:^)
According to Technorati I have been delinked many times. Many of them happened over my rather “Canadian stance” on the Gulf War II. Now that I think about it, many were in the 20’s and were male. Those never bother me much. The ones that do were the ones that were colleagues of mine in my small spiritual tribe south of the border. Some of them were friends and couldn’t handle me not supporting the Gulf War and W. I never really talked about it too much but those really hurt and the e-mails that came with them. I joke around and will quietly “de-link” a personal friend as an inside gag because we have talked about it but never over a difference of religious of political opinion.
It’s funny, Rudy Carassco of Urban Onramps (http://urbanonramps.blogspot.com) had the exact opposite view that I had and have towards the war. Despite that we continued to link to each other during it, even when we really disagreed with one another. I don’t remember us arguing about it but his tolerance of my view, made me read carefully his opinions about the Gulf War. For me, his blog and dialogue represented the very best of the blogosphere.
Just some thoughts on a crisp Saskatchewan evening.
Pax,
Jordon
strangely enough I think it was my attitude to the war that probably pushed most of my delinks over the edge too…
oh well…
Darren and Jordon:
It was difficult for some of our US friends to understand we are not from their country and to separate politics from faith, wasn’t it?
I am genuinely sorry for what you two have been through and I appreciate what you are saying here and for taking time to say it. Blog on!
Oh come off it you guys. We all know that like the United States, Canada is just an outlying province of Southern California.
I truly don’t know who links to me and who doesn’t. I was suprised to see that you have me in you’re blog roll, Bene.
As for the whole war thing, well, it’s so highly emotinal that sometimes clear thought doesn’t enter in. People seem to forget that however you feel about the war, others are equally entitled to feel the opposite, whatever country they are in. Various opinions that can be expressed respectfully are what we’re supposed to be about in a democracy. Too bad people forget that disagreeing with the government can be an act of patriotism as much as agreeing with it.