<videovortex> New media, democracy, relevance and women

[Anne Roth]

Hi,

I'm new on this list, and the reason I just subscribed (next to general
interest in net and media politics and discussions) is that Evelin
Stermitz suggested that I post the following questions here. It's not
only about video. In fact it's more about text based weblogs, but got
started by something I noticed that was done with video.

Thanks for listening and looking forward to another list that looks
interesting!

Anne

----- Original Email -------------

I'm looking for information, articles, or ideas where to to go look for
research on a special topic, or maybe it's several topics.


== Background ==


Some months ago a series of video interviews with 'important bloggers'
was published in Germany (German bloggers, that is). It just happened
that they were all male.

I ranted a little bit about it in my blog - certainly after I noticed
that in the "Top 100" of German blogs at that time the first blog
clearly written by a woman made it to no. 35 (or so).

I was surprised to see that this kicked off quite a debate in different
places. Debates about whether it matters that they're all male, about
how to define 'important', or 'relevant', about the ranking systems that
categorise German blogs. The different ways to define relevance of blogs
obviously isn't 'man-made', but done through different automated systems
using the tools of the web 2.0. What counts is websites linking to
blogs, numbers of readers, numbers of visits etc.

Assuming that no (or little) active manipulation is taking place to help
whichever group in society to gain grounds and be more important than
others I'm wondering how it happens that our much praised democratic,
participatory, interactive web2.0 seems to create a monoculture that is
much more exclusive that the real world.

I don't know - because it's less obvious than the male/female gap - but
I have little doubt that there's equally few people who are part of all
kinds of minorities. The interviewed important bloggers are all white,
German, academic...



== The Questions ==


What I'd like to find out now is whether there is any research,
articles, projects dealing with

- is this just a German phenomnon or similar in other countries?

- why are so few women considered relevant or important bloggers?

- what creates relevance/attention/importance in the web 2.0?

- how does it happen that the much praised open structures of the
current digital world seem to create even more exclusive (virtual)
realities?

I'm not active in adademia (anymore) and not even regularly reading or
writing on feminist issues. Same for all the different strands of net
culture(s), media politics and the like. And so it's perfectly likely
that I missed obvious things said on these subjects. Please let me know
of anything you know!



Thanks for any kind of help and feel free to forward this wherever you
think is appropriate!


Anne


http://annalist.noblogs.org
mostly in German

http://www.twitter.com/annnalist (German)
http://www.twitter.com/Anne_Roth (English)