(As promised/threatened earlier this week. Warning, long post ahead.)
Maybe it's the weather turning cooler, or the fear that whatever Karl Rove has up his sleeve with his multimillion dollar war chest will still leave us a Republican-controlled Congress despite our best efforts and the inclination of the majority of citizens to vote Democratic, but in the last couple of weeks the blogosphere seems to have become quite introspective. So I thought I'd do a round-up of posts wherein people look up their own URLs:
• The big meta-controversy among political and feminist blogs involves my friend of long standing Barry Deutsch, aka Ampersand, selling his domain to a "search engine optimizing" company which, apparently used his traffic to help pornographers get higher search listings for their sites, and didn't inform his readers of the sale. Here's some background reading on this from Amp himself, his cobloggers Rachel and Nick, Zuzu at Feministe, Tom at the Comics Reporter, Fred at Stone Court, MB at Making Light, Hugo Schwyzer and Tekanji. My opinion on all of this is as follows:
First of all, I have always believed that blogs are not vehicles whereby one should expect to make money. Not just a profit, but any money. That's not what blogs are designed for. Blogs are what you make of them, but essentially they're software tools which make it easy for anybody to become a one-to-many writer with a potentially humongous readership. The idea of owning a domain for the purpose of blogging in the first place strikes me as rather silly when there are any number of servers that will host your blog for free so you never have to worry about losing money the way I used to when I self-published INSIDE JOKE and the hard-copy version of Four-Alarm Firesignal and countless apazines. [And sure, Blogger and Typepad go on the blink sometimes; so what? Dedicated and private servers go buggy too, as Barry's past woes, um, amply demonstrate. And does the world fall apart if we can't post for a few hours? Some people have no patience.] If you never spend any money for a domain to host your blog, not only do you not have to hold ridiculous fundraisers or ever ask your readers to pay for your hobby (if nobody's hired you to blog and you're doing it because you feel a calling or intrinsic need or just for the heck of it, it's not a profession, it's a hobby) but you don't have to worry about losing money necessitating the kind of sale Barry made, 'cause you're not outlaying the bucks in the first place.
Secondly, I had no idea about how the sale of Amptoons affected Alas, because I read it and hundreds of other blogs via Bloglines, by subscribing to their site feeds. Read a blog's site feed instead of clicking onto the blog itself and you may occasionally come across an annoying banner ad (and I wish the folks who instituted that would stop it) but you won't give a porn site the satisfaction of falsely inflating its numbers from your click-through. Why more busy people don't read all blogs via site feeds is beyond me.
And lastly, yes, I'm in the camp that says Barry has the right to do whatever commerce he wants to without asking anyone else's permission, and I have the right to make fun of the idea of blog commerce without expecting all those whining and well-to-do blog-beggars out there to agree with me. I just shake my head that there are so many people in real need in the world, so many worthy causes to support, so much political action to take that requires cash influx, that well-off political bloggers who beg readers to subsidize their voluntary writing don't choke on their words. Not that I have an opinion or anything.
• I do have a strong opinion about internicene disputes between two bloggers I like and respect, particularly to the point of one blogger quitting, at least temporarily. It saddens the heck out of me. Zuzu lays it out here and says goodbye here. I can't tell you how much I'm going to miss Zuzu's writing, which I adore, and I'm sorry she felt she needed to be pseudonymous in order to blog and comment (much of this controversy seems to have happened in comment sections, which I rarely peruse due to lack of time), but that's her choice, not mine and not Ann's (and I read Ann's work enough to note she seems to have no problem with many other pseudonymous bloggers, to whom she regularly links). [Updates: Ann responds in Zuzu's farewell thread, Atrios does an inappropriate impression of Keith Olbermann, and Fred Vincy requests that we set the record straight.] I've written about screen names and handles before, among other places here, here and here, and mentioned that I haven't gone pseudonymous since my 20's, when just about everyone knew that INSIDE JOKE contributors "Kip M. Ghesin" and "Kid Sieve" were actually me anyway. But, as with decisions about one's body, I believe that what one does with one's online identity should be a personal decision not subject to others' judgment. As the saying goes, if you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't like pseudonymity, don't be pseudonymous and if it bothers you that much don't read posts by pseudonymous folks. Yes, of course I wish more people would use real names rather than handles, particularly in chatrooms (when I learned about Firesign friends Lew Tebbetts' and Brian Converse's deaths, my immediate response was to try to figure out who they were because they only used handles in the chatroom - scroll to the bottom here - and to my mind that's no way to be remembered), and yes, I believe that, depending on the circumstances, credibility sometimes suffers when one chooses to hide behind a fake name. However, that's still their choice, not mine (and much of it is me being selfish because I'm better at remembering names than handles). I can mock the mask, I can evince skepticism if there's trolling involved, I can even argue against the very concept if I want, but in the end it's not really my business. Pseudonymous bloggers have probably already heard all the advice they can stand about "if you used your real name in the first place you'd own it and nobody would have the power to threaten you by revealing it" and, presumably for good reason, have rejected it. [Update: Atrios gives this as a reason: "The ability to participate in the public discourse is something which previously was available only to a select few, and is now open to everyone. Part of what allows that is the ability of people to not attach their name to everything they write. People who have job and income stability (say, tenured professors) take for granted that they can say just about anything in a public space (such as the internets) without fear of consequence." But to me that still translates too much like "People can take for granted that they don't need to stand behind their words." And it also comes very much from a position of, as Atrios' title implies, privilege.] In any case, just because something makes us personally uncomfortable doesn't give us the right to force others to mitigate that discomfort. Now, if only I could take my own advice re: my discomfort over public breastfeeding...
• Here's some more about "internet outing" from Piny at Feministe. True confession, I've met Belledame in person at an Alas gathering where she told us her real name, and naturally I've completely forgotten it since (but I have put her blog on my regular reading list)... Chris Clarke also believes that outing pseudonymous blogging in comments sucks, and begs for cooler heads to prevail. Hugo has this open thread query and this quick note. Scott shakes his head. And Fartles - I mean, Ilyka - I mean, whoever she is, adds her bits here and here and here. I think I'm a Fartles fan. Seriously, just read all of Ilyka's posts from the last week or so, she's really been on a roll.
• Chris also initiated a couple posts springing from the Amptoons situation, laying out his blog policy here and here, interspersed by Far-- uh, Ilyka's own policy. It basically comes down to, paraphrasing Leslie Gore, "it's my blog so I can schrei if I want to." Anyone can blog nowadays, so anyone can make up whatever rules they want for their blog and their readers either accept that at face value or read other blogs - it's not like there aren't millions out there. We're content producers, all of us - not public servants.
• Speaking of boobs as we were above, the Huffington Post shows why it's ahead of the curve by finally noticing the "Jessica's boobs" controversy. Not a word about the all-white-bloggers-in-Harlem one, which reflects badly on liberal bloggers (one of whom is a Huffington contributor) rather than conservative ones.
• Shifting meta-gears over to the comics feminist blogosphere, pseudonymous blogger The Video Store Girl suggests rethinking feminism in comics, modestly proposing a "Cassie Code" on how writers and artists should treat female characters. The ironic thing here to me is that much of the original Comics Code had to do with salacious "headlight" comics deemed inappropriate at the time, not because they were seen as demeaning to women in the age before second wave feminism, but because the primary readership back then was deemed to be mostly the younger Not Ready for Primetime Sex set. TVSG's point was that, since it's impossible (or at the least undesireable) to legislate this sort of thing, feminist comic readers need to speak through market forces and "vote with their wallets" as well as engaging in productive discussions with male artists and writers rather than ranting to the point of alienating them. As you can imagine, this didn't sit well with a few prime ranters, among them Karen Healey (who enumerates what she terms TVSG's "stupid arguments") and Melissa Krause (and do check out Melissa's response to me in the comments section as well). [Update: TVSG puts on her cavewoman hat to fire back this salvo.] I hate to sound passive/aggressive about this, but I believe everyone here has valid points. Approaching artists with anger and frustration, however justified you may feel this anger is, may not always be the best way to raise their consciousness about Depicting the Other. My personal preference is toward knowledgeable discussion and a give-and-take of ideas (I happen to like moderating convention panels about this sort of thing). Often when an artist can't come up with a reason for doing something in response to a polite query, that may cause him to rethink his approach. I don't think most artists and writers want to alienate their audience any more than a feminist expressing frustration about yet another way in which women are smacked down culturally is looking to alienate comic book creators. That said, I think market forces only work when they're accompanied by vocal elaboration of why and how you're actually "voting with the wallet." How's a company to know I've decided not to purchase a comic because I don't like how the artist or writer depicts female characters unless I actually say so as well (loudly and often if I feel I need to)?
• Elsewhere in the aforementioned comics feminist blogosphere, Lis Fortuner uses a comment of mine in response to a post by Stephen Dann as a springboard to wondering whether critics' social conscience is sometimes blinded by fannishness and/or creator loyalty, touts the power (and, to her, the point) of blogs to serve as a vehicle for us learning about each other. Speaking of which, Kevin Church is curious as to whether anything he writes really impacts others' reading habits. Ah, the old unanswerable. That way madness lies, Kevin!
• Lastly, if you're not burnt out yet by all this meta-discussion, you may want to participate in the winter issue of the ezine Reconstruction the “Theories/Practices of Blogging.” Thanks to Wayne for the heads-up.
Off to see my parents off before they snowbird to Vegas again. Ta all!
Maybe it's the weather turning cooler, or the fear that whatever Karl Rove has up his sleeve with his multimillion dollar war chest will still leave us a Republican-controlled Congress despite our best efforts and the inclination of the majority of citizens to vote Democratic, but in the last couple of weeks the blogosphere seems to have become quite introspective. So I thought I'd do a round-up of posts wherein people look up their own URLs:
• The big meta-controversy among political and feminist blogs involves my friend of long standing Barry Deutsch, aka Ampersand, selling his domain to a "search engine optimizing" company which, apparently used his traffic to help pornographers get higher search listings for their sites, and didn't inform his readers of the sale. Here's some background reading on this from Amp himself, his cobloggers Rachel and Nick, Zuzu at Feministe, Tom at the Comics Reporter, Fred at Stone Court, MB at Making Light, Hugo Schwyzer and Tekanji. My opinion on all of this is as follows:
First of all, I have always believed that blogs are not vehicles whereby one should expect to make money. Not just a profit, but any money. That's not what blogs are designed for. Blogs are what you make of them, but essentially they're software tools which make it easy for anybody to become a one-to-many writer with a potentially humongous readership. The idea of owning a domain for the purpose of blogging in the first place strikes me as rather silly when there are any number of servers that will host your blog for free so you never have to worry about losing money the way I used to when I self-published INSIDE JOKE and the hard-copy version of Four-Alarm Firesignal and countless apazines. [And sure, Blogger and Typepad go on the blink sometimes; so what? Dedicated and private servers go buggy too, as Barry's past woes, um, amply demonstrate. And does the world fall apart if we can't post for a few hours? Some people have no patience.] If you never spend any money for a domain to host your blog, not only do you not have to hold ridiculous fundraisers or ever ask your readers to pay for your hobby (if nobody's hired you to blog and you're doing it because you feel a calling or intrinsic need or just for the heck of it, it's not a profession, it's a hobby) but you don't have to worry about losing money necessitating the kind of sale Barry made, 'cause you're not outlaying the bucks in the first place.
Secondly, I had no idea about how the sale of Amptoons affected Alas, because I read it and hundreds of other blogs via Bloglines, by subscribing to their site feeds. Read a blog's site feed instead of clicking onto the blog itself and you may occasionally come across an annoying banner ad (and I wish the folks who instituted that would stop it) but you won't give a porn site the satisfaction of falsely inflating its numbers from your click-through. Why more busy people don't read all blogs via site feeds is beyond me.
And lastly, yes, I'm in the camp that says Barry has the right to do whatever commerce he wants to without asking anyone else's permission, and I have the right to make fun of the idea of blog commerce without expecting all those whining and well-to-do blog-beggars out there to agree with me. I just shake my head that there are so many people in real need in the world, so many worthy causes to support, so much political action to take that requires cash influx, that well-off political bloggers who beg readers to subsidize their voluntary writing don't choke on their words. Not that I have an opinion or anything.
• I do have a strong opinion about internicene disputes between two bloggers I like and respect, particularly to the point of one blogger quitting, at least temporarily. It saddens the heck out of me. Zuzu lays it out here and says goodbye here. I can't tell you how much I'm going to miss Zuzu's writing, which I adore, and I'm sorry she felt she needed to be pseudonymous in order to blog and comment (much of this controversy seems to have happened in comment sections, which I rarely peruse due to lack of time), but that's her choice, not mine and not Ann's (and I read Ann's work enough to note she seems to have no problem with many other pseudonymous bloggers, to whom she regularly links). [Updates: Ann responds in Zuzu's farewell thread, Atrios does an inappropriate impression of Keith Olbermann, and Fred Vincy requests that we set the record straight.] I've written about screen names and handles before, among other places here, here and here, and mentioned that I haven't gone pseudonymous since my 20's, when just about everyone knew that INSIDE JOKE contributors "Kip M. Ghesin" and "Kid Sieve" were actually me anyway. But, as with decisions about one's body, I believe that what one does with one's online identity should be a personal decision not subject to others' judgment. As the saying goes, if you don't like abortion, don't have one. If you don't like pseudonymity, don't be pseudonymous and if it bothers you that much don't read posts by pseudonymous folks. Yes, of course I wish more people would use real names rather than handles, particularly in chatrooms (when I learned about Firesign friends Lew Tebbetts' and Brian Converse's deaths, my immediate response was to try to figure out who they were because they only used handles in the chatroom - scroll to the bottom here - and to my mind that's no way to be remembered), and yes, I believe that, depending on the circumstances, credibility sometimes suffers when one chooses to hide behind a fake name. However, that's still their choice, not mine (and much of it is me being selfish because I'm better at remembering names than handles). I can mock the mask, I can evince skepticism if there's trolling involved, I can even argue against the very concept if I want, but in the end it's not really my business. Pseudonymous bloggers have probably already heard all the advice they can stand about "if you used your real name in the first place you'd own it and nobody would have the power to threaten you by revealing it" and, presumably for good reason, have rejected it. [Update: Atrios gives this as a reason: "The ability to participate in the public discourse is something which previously was available only to a select few, and is now open to everyone. Part of what allows that is the ability of people to not attach their name to everything they write. People who have job and income stability (say, tenured professors) take for granted that they can say just about anything in a public space (such as the internets) without fear of consequence." But to me that still translates too much like "People can take for granted that they don't need to stand behind their words." And it also comes very much from a position of, as Atrios' title implies, privilege.] In any case, just because something makes us personally uncomfortable doesn't give us the right to force others to mitigate that discomfort. Now, if only I could take my own advice re: my discomfort over public breastfeeding...
• Here's some more about "internet outing" from Piny at Feministe. True confession, I've met Belledame in person at an Alas gathering where she told us her real name, and naturally I've completely forgotten it since (but I have put her blog on my regular reading list)... Chris Clarke also believes that outing pseudonymous blogging in comments sucks, and begs for cooler heads to prevail. Hugo has this open thread query and this quick note. Scott shakes his head. And Fartles - I mean, Ilyka - I mean, whoever she is, adds her bits here and here and here. I think I'm a Fartles fan. Seriously, just read all of Ilyka's posts from the last week or so, she's really been on a roll.
• Chris also initiated a couple posts springing from the Amptoons situation, laying out his blog policy here and here, interspersed by Far-- uh, Ilyka's own policy. It basically comes down to, paraphrasing Leslie Gore, "it's my blog so I can schrei if I want to." Anyone can blog nowadays, so anyone can make up whatever rules they want for their blog and their readers either accept that at face value or read other blogs - it's not like there aren't millions out there. We're content producers, all of us - not public servants.
• Speaking of boobs as we were above, the Huffington Post shows why it's ahead of the curve by finally noticing the "Jessica's boobs" controversy. Not a word about the all-white-bloggers-in-Harlem one, which reflects badly on liberal bloggers (one of whom is a Huffington contributor) rather than conservative ones.
• Shifting meta-gears over to the comics feminist blogosphere, pseudonymous blogger The Video Store Girl suggests rethinking feminism in comics, modestly proposing a "Cassie Code" on how writers and artists should treat female characters. The ironic thing here to me is that much of the original Comics Code had to do with salacious "headlight" comics deemed inappropriate at the time, not because they were seen as demeaning to women in the age before second wave feminism, but because the primary readership back then was deemed to be mostly the younger Not Ready for Primetime Sex set. TVSG's point was that, since it's impossible (or at the least undesireable) to legislate this sort of thing, feminist comic readers need to speak through market forces and "vote with their wallets" as well as engaging in productive discussions with male artists and writers rather than ranting to the point of alienating them. As you can imagine, this didn't sit well with a few prime ranters, among them Karen Healey (who enumerates what she terms TVSG's "stupid arguments") and Melissa Krause (and do check out Melissa's response to me in the comments section as well). [Update: TVSG puts on her cavewoman hat to fire back this salvo.] I hate to sound passive/aggressive about this, but I believe everyone here has valid points. Approaching artists with anger and frustration, however justified you may feel this anger is, may not always be the best way to raise their consciousness about Depicting the Other. My personal preference is toward knowledgeable discussion and a give-and-take of ideas (I happen to like moderating convention panels about this sort of thing). Often when an artist can't come up with a reason for doing something in response to a polite query, that may cause him to rethink his approach. I don't think most artists and writers want to alienate their audience any more than a feminist expressing frustration about yet another way in which women are smacked down culturally is looking to alienate comic book creators. That said, I think market forces only work when they're accompanied by vocal elaboration of why and how you're actually "voting with the wallet." How's a company to know I've decided not to purchase a comic because I don't like how the artist or writer depicts female characters unless I actually say so as well (loudly and often if I feel I need to)?
• Elsewhere in the aforementioned comics feminist blogosphere, Lis Fortuner uses a comment of mine in response to a post by Stephen Dann as a springboard to wondering whether critics' social conscience is sometimes blinded by fannishness and/or creator loyalty, touts the power (and, to her, the point) of blogs to serve as a vehicle for us learning about each other. Speaking of which, Kevin Church is curious as to whether anything he writes really impacts others' reading habits. Ah, the old unanswerable. That way madness lies, Kevin!
• Lastly, if you're not burnt out yet by all this meta-discussion, you may want to participate in the winter issue of the ezine Reconstruction the “Theories/Practices of Blogging.” Thanks to Wayne for the heads-up.
Off to see my parents off before they snowbird to Vegas again. Ta all!
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