Saturday, March 19, 2005
(3:40 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Prolegomena to any future blogroll
It's on: Ogged has de-blogrolled Bitch, PhD. He did, admittedly, also de-blogroll TBogg, which I don't think anyone has read in the last year anyway. Howls of protest can already be heard! But I think we must keep our heads. For all the pain that this decision may cause in the short term, its world-historical significance is already clear: forcing the blogosphere to rethink itself in rethinking the blogroll. What is its function? Its structure? We think we already know. Josh Marshall, for instance, does not have a blogroll, while Atrios does. We also know that some kind of duty is bound up with the concept of the blogroll, so that there is a certain amount of resentment toward Josh Marshall's decision -- one of the biggest liberal bloggers "doesn't believe in blogs." Also, we could cite the recent flap over the implicit sexism of the blogosphere, the strange coincidence that talented female bloggers tend not to get linked as often as their male counterparts.Okay, so I'm not actually ready to theoretically articulate this question. I do wonder about the blogroll, though, as a way of developing relationships (or not). How much of it is tokenism? What does it matter if you're on a million blogrolls out of inertia, when no one is really linking to your individual posts? Has anyone really ever found a new, interesting blog just by plugging through someone's blogroll? Perhaps that's possible on a relatively small list such as The Weblog's, but on some of the bigger sites, the blogrolls are basically impossible to use. I used to think it'd be a big deal to get on Atrios's blogroll, for instance, but how many people would actually visit The Weblog as a result?
The same with the Crooked Timber blogroll -- it's great that I'm in it, and I do get a couple visits a day off of it, but especially in its previous format, it was really unweildy. (My ambition was to hold off being put on the "academic" section so that I could somehow engineer an appearance in the "main" section, but I think that was pretty unrealistic.) And this causes one to ask the question: Is traffic really the issue here? Is there some kind of prestige stemming from the blogroll that cannot be flattened out into traffic? Is the blogroll a way for "big" bloggers to distribute their prestige among the unwashed masses? And if so, would a fascist approach to blogrolling that only included people of a particular racial or gender group (for instance, white males), explicitly on the basis of those biological characteristics, be more or less inimical to the Enlightenment ideal than a policy of arbitrary blogrolling and de-blogrolling that at least made a pretense of fabricating some kind of defensible reason for the behavior?
