Now I *am* creeped out by what Latoya said about the Beltway blogs, but I guess we can’t expect those guys to engage in this sort of open discussion!

Also, on Daisy’s point about privilege (#27), I am really struck by how much privilege I enjoy to be near a computer for much of the day and be able to divvy up much of my work at my own pace (even if that often means working at night). I think I would qualify as “older” in this neck of the woods (over 40) but for me that’s very much mitigated by other sorts of privilege. I still have two young kids who makes lots of demands on me, but without my flexible job (and supportive partner) I probably wouldn’t be here at all.

@Jack –

And as Jill writes above, their apology on this point didn’t really do it for me. I was not angry at Mandy and Brittany for “sticking up” for women of color; I was mad at them for SAYING RACIST PATERNALISTIC INSULTING BULLSHIT to and about women of color. Seriously, I’m not sure where the confusion lies there.

Word.

@Lisa –

This whole big blog vs. small blog thing…it’s weird. And then to add “hierarchy” sounds SO odd to me.

(Don’t get me wrong. I admit that it’s wonderful when people read and comment on something you worked on for over a week. Let’s not be ridiculous. It’s awesome.)

Very true Lisa. But I also think it depends on how people started out blogging and what they intended to do. I’ve been around the blogosphere and on message boards since 1999 – but it was all personal stuff. I had a personal journal I maintained on line where I told stories to entertain my friends at work. That was the goal. When I started writing for Racialicious I had a specific purpose and idea in mind. And Racialicious never was anyone’s personal blog – it was always meant to be a tool for communication, even in it’s first incarnation as Mixed Media Watch. So there is a lot more gray area involved in when your *personal* blog becomes known than there is when your *professional* blog becomes known.

I feel like sometimes, when having these conversations, we speak past each other because some people started blogging with the desire to be known professionally and some people started blogging to talk about ideas important to them. And while any reason for starting a blog is a good one, the changing nature of the blogosphere makes it difficult to just do your own thing without being exposed to the business aspects of it all.

@Jill –
Not because there’s necessarily shady stuff going on, but because I’m not convinced that private conversations — even about other bloggers and writers — are always a bad thing.

I think that’s were some of the confusion around this concept is coming in, Jill.

It’s kind of like what I was saying about the nature of networks.

These private conversations aren’t bad things – I mean, ye gods, we aren’t allowed to make friends? But I notice that people don’t seem to understand exactly how casual this back-room stuff actually is. Which is why most people who are in it don’t think anything strange is happening.

Here’s an example:

Let’s say you and I go to WAM again. We meet up for drinks because I like your work and read it often. We talk. You mention you need a book deal. I’m like, oh, word? Come with me to this party, I know some people in publishing. You come with me to the party, I introduce you around, you walk out of there with an agent and a book deal. Score! Friend hook up.

But if four of my friends get that same hook up, and other folks submitting proposals are getting the run around, and they look and see our book announcements, it looks like a back door deal. (Well, technically, a party back room deal, but whateves.)

Normally, when these types of things are being offered to you, it’s “Sweet – someone’s doing me a favor!” But that isn’t always how that is perceived.

Same deal with networks, in general. My friend called me and told me about something cool. She threw some work my way. But there are people who blog about similar things that I do but she doesn’t call them. Why is that? It could be anything from personal vendetta to just not liking someone’s personal style. And it’s not like we aren’t working to get our names out there. But some people will look at this and say “hmm…I’m working my ass off over here and I never got anything. How is this fair?”

Part of it is the nature of publishing – people want what they want the way they want it. I had a friend ask me if I could send her copies of a successful pitch letter. And I said I would but it took me a couple days. She sent me an email reminder, cracking that pitch letters were like gold – no one wanted to part with one. (Apparently I was the third person she asked.) I wrote her back like, “Oh no – the hard part is finding the pitch that was accepted! I went through about 30 before I found one that was purchased.” If you don’t work in media/publishing, what have you, you may not know that rejection is the name of the game. It doesn’t matter why you were rejected – you just were. And you have to move on.

Now, this is not to say there aren’t smoky back rooms. There are. When I went to Progressive Women’s Voices (a program by the women’s media center) I met a lot of intelligent, amazing women who are now in my network. And they are all experts in their fields, so they have a lot of experience with networks. My friend Lorelei told me about “the smoky back room of the internet” where the folks from all those political/beltway blogs get together and talk shop. They *know* they influence policy. And it is more or less a locked network – you have to know someone to be in.

Is that creepy? Yeah. That group is homogeneous and they like it that way. And on some level, it’s kind of creepy that these folks do sway the ideas held by government officials. (Then again, I’ve lived in DC my whole life – it ain’t that strange.) Does this mean these types of groups need to be disbanded? Maybe. But I still feel like networks give rise to other ones. If it wasn’t the smoky back room of the internet, it’s be the smoky back room at that fucking expensive ass Steakhouse down town, or the drunken hook up parties at Smith Point, or someone’s kitchen.

It is what it is.

I tend to not think too much about closed networks though. Generally speaking, they are bad networks – if they are that closed and insular, infiltrating them just leads to more headaches for you. The best kind of networks are groups of people who care about you, nothing more. And you’ll find plenty of those out here in the sunshine.

But, here’s the thing, that’s not my interest.

I. just. don’t. get. it.

What matters to me is not how many readers I’ve got, but how well I’m working, how my writing is, whether I’m learning, and how clear my understanding is of a new concept or way of thinking/reasoning.

This whole big blog vs. small blog thing…it’s weird. And then to add “hierarchy” sounds SO odd to me.

I don’t measure blogs by their size. I measure it by my own arbitrary, works- and-applies-only-for-me litmus test as to whether I learn – really learn – from the posts and comments. Most, not all, of those experiences for me, like Lauren, happen on WOC blogs and sites.

I began blogging to carve out a space for myself in the world, to have a small pocket with my writing, thoughts, and lessons. I don’t see it as big or small. I see it, more importantly, as mine. Authentically mine.

(Don’t get me wrong. I admit that it’s wonderful when people read and comment on something you worked on for over a week. Let’s not be ridiculous. It’s awesome.)

I mean, there’s “attention,” and there’s “status,” and there’s “community,” and it seems to me that these are all separate concepts, and “community” in particular requires a lot more reciprocal work than either of the other two.

And the thing is, which is what I kept hearing especially, again, from bfp and others around one of those thrashes–here too, is: lookit, it’s not even that people give that much of a shit about the hypocrisy in itself, it’s, -stop using us as a prop in your personal climb to the Top.- It’s insulting and it actually makes it -harder- to do the actual work that needs to be done, because what’s a game for points for you is life or death for us, and now everyone’s associating our goals with you and your projects and ignoring our -actual- goals, erasing our -actual- selves and voices, and it’s just seven different kinds of fucked.

…approximately.

As for other back channels, as we said before, the Feministe bloggers email and g-chat with each other, and I’ve met most of them in person (I haven’t met Cara or Jack or Kactus or our book reviewers, but some of that will be rectified at WAM this year). Most of the chatting is logistical, although I have definitely chatted and emailed about personal, non-blog-related stuff, because I also consider my co-bloggers to be friends (same with a handful of other feminist bloggers who I socialize with every few months). There have been a handful of times in my memory where a thread was going HORRIBLY and someone was being treated poorly, and there was an email sent out to say, “please help this person out” or “we need to moderate these comments more closely” — those emails go out amongst the Feministe bloggers especially during Guest Blogging season, when I’m often out of pocket for days at a time and can’t control the comments as tightly as usual. But again, that’s less about power-building and more about making sure our guests aren’t attacked and that we maintain control of this space. It’s also, as others have said, about blowing off steam. If a commenter is really annoying, I can g-chat Cara and bitch about it, or post the comment on Twitter for amuement, or email the whole team and we can have a good laugh and an eye-roll. Or when we were constructing this post, I could g-chat with Holly and ask her opinion, or Lauren could message me and talk through an issue. I think the most recent mass email I sent out was to about 10 bloggers who I knew were attending WAM; I needed a room mate and was hunting around for one, so I emailed people who I knew were going, off the top of my head.

I’m also trying to remember how I saw the Mandy & Brittany post in the first place. I feel like it may have been in a comment section here — I know Mandy was promoting it pretty hard in blog comment sections. That’s another good way to get attention (see, for example, FOAM FLUFF in the other thread).

I do see what you’re saying about social hierarchies, though. It is a lot harder to critique people you consider to be friends, and who you’ve met and socialized with in person. That is definitely an issue that I’ve had, and it’s particularly difficult when you have very loyalist tendencies and beliefs about friendships, as I do. It’s hard to call out your friends. It’s also been hard for me to be called out by people I consider friends — but I’ve had some incredibly kind and generous tough love from my co-bloggers and other feminist bloggers who have emailed me when I was being a fuck-up to say, again in an astonishingly kind way, that maybe I should reconsider the way I was behaving. I am very grateful for that, but yes, as you say, those kinds of back-end conversations do help to shape what goes up on the intertubes. I’m not sure that’s an entirely bad thing, though; at least not always.

I also don’t doubt that part of the reason why I’ve been invited to speak on panels or participate in certain events is because I’ve met people in person, we got along, and connections were made. Feministe got a bunch of links when I went to Yearly Kos, because I met people in person and promoted the blog. Those things matter. Are they smokey-room “back channel” conversations? No. But they are reflections of relative power and access issues, and transparency about them is good. At the same time, sometimes blog-relationships evolve into actual friendships. For example, I dated a blogger for a decently long period of time. I met him at a conference, and while we sometimes linked to each other, it was extremely rare (I think he linked here one time while we were dating, and we had a policy of not reading each others’ blogs during the relationship). He was part of my “real life,” which I try to keep relatively private, and so I wasn’t about to announce it in this space (I even feel weird writing about it here now). So no, I didn’t disclose that relationship, even though he was a MUCH bigger power-broker in broader bloglandia than I’ve ever been. That’s where this stuff gets very tricky — for those of us who value our privacy in our real lives, there can some overlap with our blog-lives, and what you do with that can be a bit difficult. And when you value your online friends for blowing off steam — because most of my “real-life” friends don’t blog and don’t read blogs and certainly don’t want to hear about my blog — I do wonder how healthy it would be to demand full transparency all the time. Not because there’s necessarily shady stuff going on, but because I’m not convinced that private conversations — even about other bloggers and writers — are always a bad thing.