Blogroll, Please (or, how I learned to embrace cyberbalkanization)

I have finally gotten around to adding a blogroll (see lower left). It's only a partial list; I'll be adding more soon.

Because I started blogging after reading about it on my Babycenter Birth Board, it's no surprise that mothering blogs predominate my blogroll. Kiki, Mel, Aerin, Natalie, Shekky, and Heather are all May 2004 moms. Salome's Corner and Open Switch I found through comments on Kiki's blog. City Mouse was my favorite blog I found by hitting the "Next Blog" button. I discovered Milliner's Dream when I did a Technorati search to see who else blogged about Emily Dickinson after the hurricane. Her blog led me to Ann Douglas's; I've been a fan of Ann's since I read The Mother of All Pregnancy Books obsessively during my pregnancy. Lumpenlogocracy is a group blog, and a friend of mine (Christian_Left) is a contributor.

I was psyched when Ben of Open Switch added me to his blogroll. It tickles me no end to be on the same list as Ann Coulter (right after her, no less). But my surprise at his list led me to reflect on how similar a lot of the blogs I read are.

In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (a fabulous, exhaustively researched book), Robert D. Putnam writes about the threat of "cyberbalkanization":

The Internet enables us to confine our communication to people who share precisely our interests. . . . That powerful specialization is one of the medium's great attractions, but also one of its subtler threats to bridging social capital. . . . Real-world interactions often force us to deal with diversity, whereas the virtual world may be more homogenous, not necessarily in demographic terms, but in terms of interest and outlook.

With the Internet in general and blog-reading in particular, it's comfortable to seek out people with similar perspectives. It's a lot like sitting at the same lunch table every day in high school. I have met a lot of mothers on bulletin boards and blogs, but not very many veterans or football fans. (Of course, I'm sure blogger demographics are skewed towards younger people with comparatively high socioeconomic status, so there's already a built-in bias.)

Putnam goes on to say that in the early years of the Internet (he was writing in 2000), it was hard to tell whether the Internet would be a medium like the telephone, which can encourage civic involvement and social interaction, or a medium like the television, which encourages passive consumption of content. From what I've seen so far, blogging is active. First the bloggers put their thoughts on the screen, and then readers weigh in with their comments. In that way, we're creating small new communities.

But yes, the e-world is segregated. So challenge me. Suggest a blog that you like (no porn or intense violence, please) that seems different from mine, and I'll go take a look.


Photo by merialc on flickr.com.