New Map of the Blogsphere

[james_davis_nicoll]

Charting the network of jocks, gadget hounds, political junkies, and porn aficionados



1: Daily Kos, tough on BushCo, soft on death-threats against women (the little darlings).

2: Boingboing. Well, at least it isn't Aintitcool.

3: The lost souls of Livejournal, little-known and too self-absorbed to care. Oooo, a reflective surface!

4: Highly interconnected blogs. The bright dot is Michelle Malkin. Note that when I say "bright dot", the map is not the territory.

5: The pornoverse, almost as peripheral as LJ and if not self-absorbed, definitely focused.

6: The jocks, making their way through the blogosphere with that endearing squinched up expression, like a Neanderthal presented with a laptop.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I must have missed something. Is Daily Kos genuinely soft on death threats, or did they fail to use one as an excuse to jump on the bandwagon for some sort of blogger code?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was thinking of this comment on Kathy Sierra's reaction to a harrassment campaign that ended with death-threats: "If they can't handle a little heat in their email inbox, then really, they should try another line of work." [1].





1: Context. (http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/12/22533/9224)

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I hadn't seen his actual response to the thing. Yeah, I think he missed the boat there. It's one thing to oppose the code, which he mentions, but the dismissive tone there was bad.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

On the blogs I read, I haven't seen much of a bandwagon for a formalized blogger code at all--most seem contemptuous of Jimbo Wales and Tim O'Reilly's proposal. But I have seen something of a gender gap in responses to the Sierra story. Many male bloggers have had reactions similar to Kos's, that you'll just get these lunatic ravings if you have a prominent web presence, and you have to have a thick skin; whereas the women tend to point out that the men have no idea how much more of this any prominent figure who is identifiably female gets, and how much of it seems to specifically be bullying aimed at suppressing women's participation by making it that much more annoying and scary for them. Sierra isn't even a firebrand or a politial provocateur; this seems to have happened to her primarily because she's a woman in a field often regarded as a boy's preserve.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It's a pity the Chris Clarke First They Kill Your Dog (http://faultline.org/index.php/site/comments/what_happened/) thing doesn't seem to have blipped the radar over at DK.

It's interesting that Clarke's reaction to the Sierra/Kos thing was this. (http://pandagon.net/2007/04/13/how-to-not-be-an-asshole-a-guide-for-men/) Isn't there a mental defect where internal modeling of another person's mental state leads to an emotional reaction to that state as though it was one's own? I wonder if having had a similar experience might not make one more vulnerable to this.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Don't know, but Clarke certainly seems to get it.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a mental defect where internal modeling of another person's mental state leads to an emotional reaction to that state as though it was one's own?

Yes, but it's correctible.

[deor.livejournal.com]

Women not only get more threats but especially more of the ugly sexual threats variety, which can get pretty damn scary.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There was a discussion on Crooked Timber in which a female participant (I think it was Belle Waring) told people to cut it out with the stupid racist and sexist attacks on Malkin and Ann Coulter, since it isn't as if there aren't perfectly legitimate ways to attack them. Some way down the thread, one of the male commenters (I think it was John Emerson) argued that while he understood the reasoning, it still seemed like holding back if you couldn't use every weapon in your arsenal against egregiously nasty people, and holding back wasn't something he was fond of.

The thing I don't think he entirely got was the collateral damage to potential allies from this kind of thing. If Ann Coulter says something evil and stupid, which she does approximately seventy times a day, and your response is to make some sexist crack about her Adam's apple, you haven't just attacked Coulter; you've also likely discouraged participation by women who might be sympathetic to your point of view, but don't want to be the object of stupid sex-based attacks over their looks. And that goes 10x for calling someone a whore and issuing rape threats.

[cyperus-papyrus.livejournal.com]

Well said.

Sexist attacks against a woman who says nasty things does not effectively counter what she says and only lowers the attacker to the same level of egregious nastiness.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

As a trans gendered female, my initial response is a T-shirt with Coulter's picture on it and a bar sinister through it with the caption:
"Not One of Us!"
And that's about as far as I go.

[elynne.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

Specifically, the threats are scary because so many women feel vulnerable to rape, battery, and other forms of assault.

This sense of vulnerability is partly practical -- we all know someone who has been raped, and many of us have been raped ourselves. It's also partly cultural, since (A) many of us were not taught effective ways to defend ourselves (changing in the yuounger generation), (B) many of us were taught that any rape or assault was our fault, which adds shame and helplessness to the emotional mix, and (C) many of us were taught that boys, physically strong as they are, would be irremediably damaged or destroyed if a female said the wrong words or even beat them at chess, therefore we tend to hold back so as not to shatter a man's delicate ego.

The other cultural component to this is that men tend not to fear rape or assault. Yeah, rape happens -- in jail, of course, but also out of it. I know several men who as adults were raped by women and even more who were raped as children. Although most actual muggings and beatings are male-on-male violence, guys don't seem to take that into account as a possibility -- whereas the calculation of rape probabilities is something many women do constantly and even unconsciously. Or maybe guys just don't talk about the fear.

[dhole.livejournal.com]

Makes me wonder what's on the dark side of the blogosphere.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Is it just me, or are LJ and the similar arc at the bottom on the RHS that isn't labelled (myspace?) the jocks' Trojans? Though interpreting the map that way does put DKos as the Sun.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

Just had a bit more of a look, and the guy behind the image has a few other visualisations of the data on his site, the first of which shows LJ much more prominently (as far as I can tell, this is because it ignores whether links are reciprocated).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

So... LiveJournal isn't self-absorbed, it's just that nobody links to it.

Part of the reason for that may be that LJ doesn't prominently display permalinks to articles--you can get a permalink by clicking on the comments link, but that's not obvious.

Or maybe LiveJournalers just write crappy blogs.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...And I now realize that many LJ styles do have permalinks, which strengthens the "crap" hypothesis.

[ionlylurkhere.livejournal.com]

To play devil's advocate, I think the "12 year old girls being drama queens about their friends list" prejudice is widely held in the blogosphere as a whole, which probably means that a) there are a lot of people who do assume LJ is full of crap, and b) even the people who don't assume that know that the people who do won't take a link to LJ seriously, so avoid linking to it, even if there's an individual post they think is good.

OTOH, I do think a lot of LJ is crap by the standards of the blogosphere, simply because it's a weird hybrid between a blog and a diary that you let everyone read. LJers are forever posting memes and cute pictures of cats and whatever silly thing pops into their head, whereas the really popular blogs are the ones with a strong focus on one topic. (Where comms fit into this I'm not sure.)

[tomscud.livejournal.com]

Heck, I think of my LJ as a place to post stupid youtube videos of Godzilla rampaging through Mario world, as well as personal updates for the handful of people who know me from rl and read the lj. Back when I was making a pretense of serious blogging did that stuff somewhere else.

LJers are forever posting [...] cute pictures of cats

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

One phrase: "bacon cat."

Also, I just looked at Kathryn Cramer's site and it is not entirely feline-free,

[jwgh]

It seems like a common progression in Livejournal is: person has friends (online or not) who use livejournal, person gets Livejournal account to make it easier to comment on other peoples' livejournals and read friends-only entries, person starts using Livejournal to blog, and the rest is history. The strong pull of step 2 may be an additional reason why Livejournal posts are mostly linked to by other Livejournal users, although there is a certain something about the 'crap' hypothesis that makes me reluctant to rule it out.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Also, LJs tend not to have "blogrolls" beyond the friends list, which discourages people outside the LJ garden from blogrolling them.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I'm happy to see LJ way out on the edge. Journaling for one's friends and a few random passersby is not, IMO, the same as blogging; I don't know many serious bloggers who use LJ for that purpose. And I know a lot of people who have both an LJ and a "real" blog (elsewhere).

Sometimes being an outlier can be a happy thing.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Agree. "Blog" is defined too widely in this case. LJ seems more like a series of personalzines than a frequently updated commentary.

Still, I'm amused that LJ is noted and MySpace isn't.

[writerjob.livejournal.com]

I'm one of those who have an LJ and a blogger account.

LJ doesn't show up on Google searches, so it feels more private.
I blather a bit in LJ.

When I generate stuff that might be widely useful, it goes to the Blogger site.

Google Search

[barondave.livejournal.com]

A Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22+write+Historical+Romance+set+in+the+Napoleonic+War+era.+%22+writerjob&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8) that finds only your lj.

Re: Google Search

[writerjob.livejournal.com]

Ooooh. You're right. I have been getting 'hits' on the blogger account, so I figured the LJ account was not showing up in Google searches ....

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

*waves a little light. which is taped TO MY CAT*

LJ has GURL COOTIES!