The fact is you still need money if you want your page to look reasonable, and more than anything you need time. If you are a mom with few resources, I think you will make different choices from someone who has time/money. Once you factor in privilege, education, means and opportunity, a very different picture of the blogging world emerges.

My close reading of a wide range of blogs – mommyblogs, adoption, infertility, politics, recovery, etc to name a few – shows me a world where most blogs operate very autocratically. Especially if you look at a) how comments function in separating and grouping individuals, b) how cliques emerge, and c) how the status quo is maintained by long time readers who identify personally with the blogger and rush to defend by shutting down conversations.

I often wonder how many comments never see the light of day due to the blogger’s moderation. I wonder how many people never comment or stop reading after they see petulant displays usually observed on playgrounds (although I have to be honest, I have seen better behaviour on the playground than in the blogosphere recently). If we really look at the meaning of democracy, and certainly within the North American (US/Canada) context, it means being free to speak, I truly do not believe that the blogosphere functions as a democracy because there is too often such a rush to shut down debate and discussion. Consequently I hold no hope that what you see on the ‘net is reflective of the diversity that we may glimpse in our real world lives, if we choose to catch those glimpses and embrace it whole heartedly.

However I do believe, that even with these problems, the absence of the blogosphere would be a very real threat to democracy if the sharing of information across all kinds of lines. It is a conundrum that I think is worthy of further exploration, and I for one, would love to know more about the kind of work you are doing.

Best Pink

So far the only concrete bit I have (because I’m still in the process of crunching numbers for the rest of it) is that communities tend to link within themselves, first of all–no great surprise. So moms of regular kids tend to link to other moms of regular kids, and moms of kids w/ Downs tend to link to other moms of kids w/ Downs, and so on. The problem being, first off, if you are a mom of a regular kid it’s a lot easier to get links from outside of your community, and your community is a lot bigger, so you end up w/ way more links overall. And since success and status on the blogosphere tend to be measured in links and/or traffic, that’s a big advantage.

It also looks like it’s a lot easier to break down that wall if your special-needs child is not disabled. The two SNM blogs on my blogroll that break the pattern involve kids who have some sort of issue, but it doesn’t affect their physical abilities, cognitive development or social skills. Whereas blogs by moms of kids who have some sort of condition affecting one of those three things are not as popular.

I’m now in the process of looking at traffic and ingoing/outgoing links, and it looks to be shaking down the same way. I haven’t looked at other factors, b/c my talk is supposed to be on SNM blogs, but my hunch is if I looked at it by income or class or race or whatever, you’d see a similar pattern.

I think the reason this is bugging me so much is b/c it’s already so easy to be isolated in real life if your child faces issues above the norm, and then to have it reinforced on the supposedly democratic sphere of the internet is just infuriating.