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Saturday, December 18, 2004
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MOI, MARGUERITE BLOGGIERE...
There's a big ol' discussion going on at Crooked Timber about the relative scarcity of women bloggers. UD thought it might be useful to review some aspects of her own blogging experience, since she is herself a bona fide woman. Who blogs. TEARS, TRIALS, TRIUMPH: ONE WOMAN BLOGGER'S STORY Everyone but everyone is on about the gender gap in blogging -- tons of men blog, and few women do -- or rather, few women who blog get serious readership and serious attention. UD isn't sure what truly serious readership is; she assumes her own readership of roughly 500 unique visits a day (visits have fluctuated a lot this month, from 1600 one day to 300 another), plus a little under fifty links, is respectable for a sole proprietor who's been in business for a year… She's also worth almost $11,000 on that meaningless Blogshares fantasy market thing! Anyway, she hopes this means she is respectable enough to say a few things about the situation. I don't know how much of what I have to say pertains to being a woman, or just being a human being, or just being the peculiar human being that is me and me alone. But here goes. Make of it what you will. I: TECHNOLOGY I am totally non-technical and in fact pretty actively hostile to or indifferent toward a good deal of technology. If it were not for the fact that my niece is a brilliant computer science undergraduate willing to be bothered by me night and day for help with everything imaginable I would not have been able to open shop. I still can't figure out how to put images on my site (though now my fourteen year old daughter does that for me). Nor have I developed much of an affection for or interest in the endless technical thingies I could be learning to enhance my site, increase my readership, whatever. I do find that I'm competitive about my site - I want it to be noticed - but not to the extent that I'm willing to futz in any serious way with technology. I do what I do, with help from my niece (she even designed and ran an ad for me! I couldn't have done this at all.), but I'm aware that it's not all I could be doing. In short, technically I remain pathetic - every time I add a new blog address to my Blogger template I'm incredibly proud of myself. Pathetic. II: COURAGE People who blog get ridiculed, attacked, etc. I don't know whether, as a woman, I'm less inclined to allow this to happen than a man would be, but I know that the prospect of cruel remarks slowed down my decision to blog. Like many people, I can dish it out, but I don't take it very well. A couple of things got me over this fear. One was the realization that of course all public writers of any kind who take strong views can expect to get shat upon on occasion, and if I were serious about the state of the American university (the subject of my blog) I'd just have to learn to take it. Yet my fear of what people might say kept me from making my site comments-enabled until only about a month ago. And when a satire I wrote about Isaiah Berlin generated a lot of comment on Crooked Timber awhile back, I was so afraid of what people might have said that I made my husband filter out any nasty remarks (there weren't any, as it turned out) and only read pleasant ones aloud to me! I've advanced a bit since then, as I say, but I'm still nervous about the very public nature of my blog. In fact, I intended originally for it to be anonymous, but my niece went ahead and opened the account with my real name on it, so I figured what the hell. In retrospect, I'm glad I'm not anonymous; I respect, however, anyone's decision to run an anonymous blog. III: WRITING Although I've always worried about I and II - technology and courage - I've always been pretty confident about my ability to write, and I've adored the daily business of getting some prose down on things that matter to me. Because all of the "how to write a successful blog" articles I've read insist that readers want some personal data, I provide some of this, but unlike a lot of women bloggers I've seen, I'm rather reluctant to do so (here, as in many other matters, I'm on Ophelia Benson's wavelength - she's the proprietor of Butterflies and Wheels), and when I do so, I try hard for most of it to have some relevance to larger university or more broadly social issues. I do think that the assumption of some women that the details of their personal lives are of interest to people is an unfortunate one and perhaps undermines the effectiveness of some of their blogs. A good writer, of course, can make anything interesting to readers, but it's not at all easy to carry this off, and running a photo of your cat with a couple of paragraphs describing his treatment for diabetes is probably not that keen a move for an ambitious blogger, unless you do it very seldom, or can make the whole thing uproariously funny. I also think that in the business of having strong political and social views, men tend on average to be better about striking the right range of tones, seem more comfortable keeping up an engaging, serious flow of commentary about the world. Plenty of women bloggers are good at this, too, but some of them are too emotional. Blogging, it seems to me, is a cool medium; you need to modulate your voice. |