i'm generally skeptical of much of what's newly available for diabetic treatment, such as implants and vaccines. but the bbc today reported the first news that excited me in this area: a possible cure for diabetes.
shelley powers writes about what she calls a "gender ghetto":
The power of weblogs is that anyone can have one and post their thoughts online. There is a true democracy at work. However, a democracy isn't always the best form of group organization within a heterogeneous body. What happens is that the majority tends to hold all the influence.
Supposedly within weblogging, women form over 50% of the webloggers, and you would think that they then receive 50% of the links. However, what I'm finding, at least in the weblog circle that I tend to traverse on my daily prowls, is that links to women occur much less frequently than links to men. I'm not talking blogroll links; I'm talking about links to posts, with associated commentary.
shelley's assumption that the top echelons of weblogging would be come close to representing the broader population stems from a confusion between the majority holding all the influence, and exercising it. the parable of mouseland seems appropriate:
All the laws were good laws. For cats. But, oh, they were hard on the mice. And life was getting harder and harder. And when the mice couldn't put up with it any more, they decided that something had to be done about it. So they went en masse to the polls. They voted the black cats out. They put in the white cats.
shelley seems to be advocating voting for white cats without questioning why the mice are voting for cats at all. why everyone fills their weblogs with links to the same few people is, i think, a more interesting question than why these few people are men. (the answer to that question is simple: they're men because weblogging came from the real world, in which men have long enjoyed priviledge over women.) the gender gap shelley has described is nothing more than one aspect of the power law clay shirky described. if women were at the top of the power curve, most links would be to women. women get disproportionately less links in the current system, but so does anyone who is in some way unlike those at the top of the power curve. the top will never be representative of the bottom because it can't be. the power curve is a power curve because the top is significantly different than the bottom. if it weren't, the curve would be flatter, but it's not. shelley's "gender ghetto" is in no way segregated from the rest of the bottom of this curve, so the real "ghetto" is the whole bottom of the curve, which contains about 99% of all webloggers. it's not much of a "ghetto".
gender doesn't strike me as an interesting distinction here, partly because i don't believe you can reliably tell someone's gender from their writing. the gender genie found that i often write "like a female", and jessica often writes "like a male". shelley concludes her piece with I want to be an influence now
, but she is an influence now. she's just not a power now. she's not one of the few people whose links are copied on thousands of other weblogs. but does she really want to be? if we're only concerned with concentrating the power in new hands at the top of the power curve, we're missing out on the bigger opportunity to flatten the curve by finding ways to turn our influence into networked power at the bottom. because while the power may rest at the top of the power curve right now, the potential power is undoubtedly largest at the bottom. we all use our influence (linking) to increase the concentration of power at the top by turning over our influence to them (if they link to something, we do too), but how could we be using it to create power at the bottom, where it could be much greater? i think this is a much larger and more important question than shelley's Women's voices have not not been heard as loudly as they should in these areas in the past -- is this same lack of influence now going to be taken into the communication media of the future?
but if that's a good catalyst to get people interested in the issues of how we could better use our influence, it couldn't hurt. i'd just like to see the issue expanded a bit to include the other 49% of us down here at the bottom of the power curve.