I Made Some Science: Massaging the
Medium
By Richard Leader
Printable
Version 
We all have personal relationships with media: our
individual histories of communication have shaped both how we attempt
to express ourselves and the specific content—fashioned by
constraint and desire—we choose to share with those around
us. The language we speak has a vocabulary that serves as a rule
set of sorts, purposefully and accidentally making one thing more
easily articulated than another, encouraging us to think and act
in specific ways. Other filters such as gender are imposed, guiding
under which circumstances and to what effect our voices can be used.
Even then, more personal and esoteric events in our lives inform
our expression, and in turn, appear as artifacts in the things we
say and create, even if the specific incidents that inspired them
remain unremarked upon or unseen.
While the specificities of these boundaries are entirely arbitrary,
their imposition upon us is not and serves the political exigencies
of those in power. They retain the right not only to limit speech
through both unfettered censorship (which occurs even in America
under our First Amendment, as those with wealth can easily redefine
minority subjectivities—in opposition to their own majority
“objectivity”—as slander to silence them through
threat of law) and through the constant revision of speech genres.
Typology can control what speech is allowed to mean: this can be
as simple as the divisions in a bookstore where a banner indicating
“romance” or “science fiction” can signal
both audience expectation for the content and the constraints under
which its creator operated.
Those limits are not only descriptive of the editorial and publishing
hoops the writer was forced to jump through in order to externalize
that content and place it into the marketplace, but of what the
author was allowed to envision given his or her own identity in
society and what that vision was allowed to portend. This is not
to say that fame or fortune cannot be had in “genre-work,”
indeed it is often encouraged by the powers that be, only that F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is not “romance”
even though it contains many of the same elements that the average
Harlequin novel provides: this is a function not just of what he
said—though he certainly said it well—but of who he
was saying it and the meaning and value society (then, as now, controlled
by those who related to Fitzgerald as peers) wished to ascribe to
it given his identity.
As identities have become ever more mutable, genres of speech have
been continuously emended by those in power to preserve and defend
their own elite status. This can be witnessed in the social construction
of the weblog, the “blog” format for online communication.
While there are a few specific elements of form and style closely
associated with the blog, most of these are purely nominal: a list
of hyperlinks is merely a list of hyperlinks, even if the title
“blogroll” is appended to it. In that sense, ideas such
as a “blogosphere” (the sum total of every blog forming
a gestalt of sorts, a concept flattering to those who believe themselves
within it) are more mythic than real. Such myths are ultimately
political creatures.
Masculinity and a macho vision of literacy is the driving force
behind the blog phenomenon. This is a literacy that privileges active
generation over passive relation, where men are only required to
waste just enough time reading the thoughts of others in order to
form their own privileged response—both in their own blogs
and in the commentary sections of other websites—agonistically
wrestling to dominate others into being a mere member of an audience,
a demotion the male-socialized psyche abhors. Despite the strong
possibility that the formation of the blog as a genre is a direct
manifestation of the antifeminist backlash in contemporary society,
the possibility of this hermeneutic being arrived upon en masse
has been largely precluded by the constant refrain that the blog
is an inherently politically revolutionary genre: even when compared
to numerous other forms of electronic communication that are no
longer seen as sexy, even if they were likewise hailed as radically
world-shattering a mere decade ago.
The blog phenomenon is one in name only: people have been effectively
“blogging” before the word itself was ever coined and
the term now exists as an expression of male power; men define,
reshape, and police it. Initially, it was in men’s best interest
to exclude women from the world of blogs and the power the genre—that
is, the very belief that it constituted an authentic genre worthy
of recognition—in order to reserve that semantic authority
for themselves and their corporate interests. Women were allowed
into the game as full participants only when the specific permission
served the needs of both individual men (Nick Denton’s own
celebrity and bank account through his creation of Ana Marie Cox
into the “Wonkette” character) and men as a class, the
division of male and female identities being reinforced in some
fashion. This process has naturally proved contentious within the
blogosphere, where female bloggers have reacted to men’s dismissal
of their existence: something that came to a head in February of
2005 when Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly wrote a
short column on the issue, starting a recurring pattern of male
writers pointedly asking “where are the women bloggers?”
Rather than a legitimate question, the “where is” signals
an ironic statement, as it is generally posed by men whenever they
come face to face with said women bloggers.
Drum focused exclusively on popular political blogs, arriving at
the figure of about 10 percent of them being helmed by women (all
of that number highly conservative in their political viewpoints),
reasoning that women in general simply do not appreciate the sadomasochistic
power plays—or the “food fight” mentality in his
own euphemistic words—that the genre of “opinion writing”
requires, especially online. Women attacked both his notion of “popular”
and “political,” accusing male bloggers of being reticent
to link to female writers and argued that there exists an intentional
myopia when it comes to acknowledging political processes that affect
primarily women as being properly political, rather than merely
personal.
The watershed moment in the understanding and reporting of this
phenomenon was when the Democratic Party bastion amongst blogs,
The Daily Kos, decided that women’s access to abortion as
a human right was an untenable fringe issue, causing many of the
female participants (many of whom ran subordinate blogs under the
auspices of the larger male-owned site) to splinter away from the
website. The site founder, Markos Moulitsas, has found himself faced
with feminist critics on many occasions, once bragging of his unflappable
stance when faced with accusations of sexism for running an advertisement
that objectified women. He arrogantly dismissed the “women’s
studies” crowd as looking for “subjugation under every
rock” instead of focusing on “the important shit.”
That shit, happens to be the shit that affects men. While Moulitsas
ultimately supports women’s right to choose abortion, it is
not out of sympathy for women (“I’ve actually heard
people say ‘abortion is a core part of the Democratic Party’.
Bullshit it is. I hate abortion. It’s a horrible, horrible
thing. You make that a ‘key’ part of the party, and
I’ll start looking for a third party.”), but out of
his own “privacy” advocacy. This frames the debate in
a way that protects men’s interests as an essential part of
the argument: if women want to preserve their own bodily integrity,
they must attach themselves to men’s privacy bandwagon—as
subordinates—in order to accomplish that goal.
In response to such exclusion, women worked to form their own blog
communities (some of which have organized conferences such as BlogHer)
and have fought for acknowledgement of their existence as bloggers.
It was at that moment that patriarchy, in a classic “heads
we win, tails you lose” maneuver, chose to revise the very
idea of the blog as a genre. Previously, somewhere around 2001,
male society decided in a sudden fit that a certain variety of webpages
were interesting and important. Such sites had existed all along,
but it was now imperative that they should be called “blogs”
in order to differentiate them from pages with less social currency.
What women were and what they were doing—the content they
were crafting as a result of their identity—was not considered
interesting and important by male society so their work was not
considered to be part of the blog phenomenon.
Now that it is in the best interest of patriarchy to widen the
definition of “blog” to include more woman as bloggers
(indeed, every woman who has ever used the internet even once is
now a likely candidate) in order to placate feminist critics, it
has done so for its own reasons, allowing men the perception that
the privilege of their so-called “A-List” status in
the blogosphere is the result of a meritocracy, the cream rising
to the top. As Timo Honkasalo once pointed out to me, “all
meritocracies eventually degenerate into elitism when the ‘cream’
starts to redefine ‘merit’ to suit their own interests.”
Thus, male bloggers are now more than willing to admit that they
are a minority, a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the staggering
number of female writers who use the internet for publishing and
social interaction of various sorts. As such, the many feminists
who are still laboring to expand that ratio of female to male bloggers,
and the public reporting of such statistics, are playing into patriarchal
hands.
At the center of this is the MIT Weblog Survey, conducted over
the summer of 2005. A Ph.D. project of Cameron Marlow, the poll
asked a series of pedestrian questions of blog writers about their
patterns of internet use (“How often do you post to your blog,”
“How many separate URL addresses has your blog had,”
etc.) and a number of similar queries about offline communication,
making it appear as if the survey as a whole was interested in supposing
some sort of dichotomy, perhaps with daily verbal communication
diminishing to a degree for heavy bloggers. However, given Marlow’s
historic interest in patterns of media propagation—that is,
how it is popularized and transmitted by public agents—something
he freely admitted on his own blog at Overstated.net, some began
to wonder if the content of the survey itself was fundamentally
meaningless, at least to the study itself, and designed purely to
inspire audience participation. Christina Pikas, who keeps a blog
at ChristinasLibraryRant
at Blogspot.org, wrote:
It just occurred to me that the PI might be using the survey
as a meme to study information diffusion. He only contacted
A-listers directly, and now lots of us with >100 subscribers
are responding... makes you go hmmm
Yet
the MIT Media Survey became a lightning rod for the expression of
gender politics, given the background events that were unfolding
during this time period. As women were still fighting to win their
way into the blogger nomenclature, a feminist rally cry was sounded
to participate in the study, as if it were each woman’s duty
to stand and be counted in it. Those who took the survey posted
blog entries of their own about their participation, encouraging
their readers to do the same with a precocious icon linking back
to the entry page of the poll. One icon declaring “I made
some science” seemed to be the favorite of the feminist community,
as well as that of everyone else for that matter (though men seemed
far more apt to use some of the more cryptic icons such as “I
broke the power law” and “Free Cameron”), the
very quaintness of the expression belying the fact that it was precisely
MIT’s status as a patriarchal powerhouse that made this survey
more important than the next one in the minds of respondents. After
all, it was not Cameron Marlow’s Media Survey, but the MIT
Media Survey, something that the shameless pleas for audience participation
in it that he made on his own blog to “help him graduate”
were incapable of dispelling. A study conducted at a less prestigious
institution would be forced to take itself more seriously, as those
locked out of the current power structure are forced to abide by
more stringent guidelines for their behavior.
Surveys are an often desperate attempt to quantify data for the
sake of quantifying it; patriarchy requires its own subjectivities
to be shored up as unadulterated objectivity, whenever possible,
and male sociologists in particular seem to be paranoid about their
own genitalia when arguments over “hard” versus “soft”
sciences arise. The contagious or viral model of information transmission—typically
focused on “memes,” a term that has achieved buzzword
status as of late—has many useful properties. However, self-awareness
of its own popularity is not one of them. The contagious framing
is both easily colonized by capitalism (Blogshares.com assigns a
monetary value to the importance of various blogs based on some
sort of fantasy stock market) and incognizant of how patriarchy
itself is typically the most useful contagion: in one viral marketing
contest, The Contagious Media Showdown, was won by a team purporting
to sell “Forget Me Not” panties, underwear men could
use spy on their female partners. Due to both male mirth and feminist
outrage, though numbers of each party were certainly skeptical of
the product’s authenticity, the team’s entry catapulted
them to the number one position in the contest-slash-science experiment,
the discipline ever-agonistic. Similarly, the propagation of Marlow’s
survey also took free advantage of both MIT’s esteem within
a patriarchal society (based on the masculine image it cultivates)
and the strife in the blogosphere due to the dismissal of women’s
presence within it.
Given that background, where women participated as a deliberate
political act, the gender breakdown of the survey might be of little
use in determining the sex or gender ratios of bloggers as a whole;
yet that information is very likely to be considered the most valuable
that it produces. The crafter of the poll evidently thought so as
well, a preliminary page that at one point displayed results of
random questions always listed the number of male and female subjects,
even when sex—and presumably gender—was not a factor
in the specific results being displayed. (The feature is now removed,
likely in anticipation of a full publication.) Of the 59,617 respondents,
22,083 were listed as male, with a number of 36,380 for females.
A different set of figures were also given in another set of preliminary
results, though the previous numbers were also located on the exact
same page, listing 16,750 males and 28,123 females responding to
a direct question about their sex.
Prior to this, the most commonly cited statistic on the ratio of
male to female bloggers was that of LiveJournal.com, one of many
websites that freely hosts user blogs. Their statistical information
is more transparent and accessible than most, given its history
as a community project, rather than a corporate enterprise. For
over a year the percentage of female identified writers has hovered
at around 66 percent, although in raw numbers, the amount of users
identifying as male and not identifying as anything at all is running
neck and neck, calling into question the validity of the statistic
when applied to the question it is supposed to be answering. (Ignoring
for the moment the fact that the question itself as it stands concerns
biological sex, a group of LiveJournal users have started a “gender
petition” to get a wider swath of options listed, although
their goals often seem to be self-contradictory, reinforcing gender
as an ideology as much as deconstructing it: “some people
feel that checking a gendered box helps to enforce stereotypes that
limit a person’s ability to express their gender fully in
today’s society.”) Given the public esteem for MIT’s
muscles, Marlow’s statistics on the sex of bloggers is likely
to replace that of LiveJournal’s when it comes to popular
reporting, but the latter still presents an interesting test case
pertaining to gender and the typology of the blog as a genre.
While LiveJournal’s demographics have made it an opportune
example for feminists and patriarchs alike when it comes to proving
that there are more female bloggers than male, the truth of that
assertion has been held under a pall, given men’s ownership
of language and semantics. LiveJournal is cited whenever men require
a large number of female bloggers to exist, in order to prove that
male writers are indeed the cream rising to the top; that argument
having been made, the semantic difference between a “journal”
and a blog-proper is used to renege on that nomenclature, turning
LiveJournal into a pink ghetto of teenage diarists who never write
seriously about serious subjects—that “important shit”
that The Daily Kos covers so well. Thus, the women who write at
LiveJournal (or even elsewhere) are true bloggers only when it is
convenient to male society.
The notion of public versus private writing is also particularly
at flux when it comes to the participants at LiveJournal, even more
so than those who avail themselves of other free hosts for their
blogs. For the most part, search engines such as Google ignore the
specific content of LiveJournal users, though some pages containing
user-information (not specific postings) are periodically cached
by such services. This is perhaps due to factors that are both accidental
and intentional: the dynamically generated pages of LiveJournal,
that have fostered the growth of community groups and a more social
aesthetic (something that might have been a significant factor in
drawing more women to the website to begin with, dangerous as such
suppositions might be these days when even patriarchs can declare
one an “essentialist!”), are harder for search engines
like Google to accurately catalog; that Google itself purchased
the rival Blogger.com and all of its Blogspot.org accounts in 2002
could have diminished its incentive to even try.
While someone searching for specific information—political
or not—will almost never turn up content displayed on a LiveJournal
account, in other ways, information on such pages is far more public
than most of its users are ever made aware. This again suits male
proclivities. Given the more private image the service has, perhaps
an artifact of the same sexism declaring it a pink ghetto and its
invisibility to search engines, many of its clients possess a false
sense of security: while they have the capability of restricting
the access of certain content to only those logged into specific
user-accounts marked as “friends,” it can often seem
like an unnecessary precaution. However, LiveJournal has a “latest”
feature that collates the last dozen or so posts made on the service
globally into a single page. This is perhaps a vestigial function
from the website’s early days, given that several hundred
new entries are now made every minute; that content passes through
the queue so quickly, and is hence very transient, gives users a
false sense of security when it comes to the feature (a sense that
has perhaps ensured the feature’s continued existence).
Men have devised several methods for specifically harvesting images
from the “latest” page, cataloging them into galleries
for further inspection at their leisure: photographs of girls and
women being of prime interest. Despite the operation of dozens of
websites collecting such images, only a very small percentage of
the female LiveJournal user base is aware of them. Few have any
reason to suspect how very public their publicly posted images actually
are, given the rather small audiences that their blogs garner under
normal circumstances. This makes it rather simple for males to latch
onto specific images, their stalking habits facilitated by the community
based system of LiveJournal: they can easily join groups to which
the woman posting the image belongs in an attempt to interact with
her, the woman having no reason to suspect his presence or how he
arrived there. Or they can simply just rate the appearance of various
females as if it were the “Hot or Not” website, the
founder of which—James Hong—was invited to the launch
party of The Contagious Media Showdown, along with Wonkette’s
Nick Denton, and Jeff Mack of Alexa Internet.
Alexa, a victim of the search engine wars (eventually capitulating
to Google), found a way to survive into the present through the
marketing of its website ranking system to advertisers: Alexa’s
“traffic rank” for sites is often taken as gospel by
the advertising executives who decide which sites to work with and
how much money they deserve, based on their audience size and popularity.
Websites such as The Daily Kos tend to do quite well in achieving
high ranks. However, when it comes to advertising, the women of
LiveJournal are either ignored or taken for granted. Such was the
case when the agents behind the book Cooking to Hook Up: The
Bachelor’s Date-Night Cookbook decided to add a bit of
contagious media to their own public relations campaign. The marketing
page for the book contained a 10-question quiz that women could
take to find out their own purported archetype (party girl, progressive
girl, girl next door, etc.), which would then generate HTML code
for the takers to post into their own LiveJournals; the service
being mentioned by name and distinct from the categories of “website”
and “blog” listed alongside it. Those pasting the code
into their own spaces would find a large picture specific to the
archetype displayed (with a link back to some fluffy pseudo-feminist
text at the Cooking to Hook Up site), along with an exhortation
for others to take the “What Kind of Girl Are You?”
quiz as well.
Beyond the basic irony of men today being so deeply illiterate
that a book designed to get them laid has to be marketed instead
to women, it is profoundly troubling that despite advertiser’s
general reticence to pay women bloggers what they and their audiences
are worth, that the words of feminism (so readily employed by the
Cooking to Hook Up authors, a formerly married heterosexual
couple) were used to take advantage of this fact, able to so effectively
advertise their book for free through their “meme.”
While some economists have debated over whether or not minority
communities in urban areas actually have the same spending capacity
per square foot as the less densely packed whites of suburbia, even
acknowledgement of their potential as consumers has not been a call
for equal treatment but for exploitation; so it goes for the pink
ghettos of women’s culture.
Given that female bloggers are only bloggers when male society
needs them to be (and furthermore, a webpage itself is only a blog
when patriarchy requires the genre to exist), playing the numbers
game is a futile enterprise, as it has been for the women of LiveJournal
who were not protected by their majority status: their identity
is mutable from bloggers to mere diarists, their words private but
their likenesses public, and they are positioned always as passive
consumers, never as full participants in the capitalist system.
In all three respects LiveJournal might be an extreme example, but
if so, it is proof enough of what patriarchy would like to do to
all women who express themselves, even those who host their own
domain names and run their own file servers. Even as male society
has worked to reshape the blog as a genre to suit its purposes,
it is only so elastic, and the constant pull in different directions
as women are systematically excluded and recruited into the genre
threatens to cause a permanent tear: when it is no longer of any
use to men, it will be abandoned just as the homepage and webzine
were, in favor of some new format (podcasts and beyond) that is
advantageous to men, being the early adopters who are first on the
scene. In order to combat this in the here and now, the debate has
to be centered on patriarchy—not blogs.
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