Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

i’ve been reading clay shirkey’s stuff on the power laws (long tail, etc.) of social life. One prominent one, from Vilifred Pareto, was the 80/20 rule: 20% would own 80% of the wealth. You can read up on the whys and wherefores at wiki. Meanwhile, my point in writing was something I read awhile ago: bloggers whining about people not reading them. They said that, while they appreciated traffic from big bloggers linking to them, they really hated it that so few people actually replied and engaged with them about the post in question.

*sigh*

Here’s the thing, there’s well-documented research that I’ve actually written about before, here and elsewhere, that the 80/20 power law for electronic participation is even more unequal. It’s more like 95/5, sometimes 98/2. So, you stop and count up your posters over a week or month or 6 months. The longer the better. Then, you count up how many visitors you had. Don’t count the repeaters. Are you doing _better_ than 95/5? I’ll bet you actually *are*. And if not, then figure that, guess what, you are probably fucking _average_. Wow. a special little snowflake just like everyone else.

next: tell me something, could you actually handle the demands on _your_ time if everyone showed up to comment in lengthy engaged replies?

for christ sake. it takes time to blog and more time to attentively respond to your readers who engage with your work thoughtfully and, in turn, expect 95/5 ratio of YOUR fucking time for their effort. geddit yet?

the problem is that the infrastructure of blogging is geared to the isolated, elevated, asocial individual. it is built to be a system of inequality.

I mean, christ, if you want people to engage with you, if you want people to consider your ideas, go to other people’s blogs and engage them and bring up your ideas there. Why not? If the point, you say, is that you want engagement, then blog at an already established blog. Why is it only possible to engage people by writing blog posts at your own blog. You can have great engaging conversations with people at currently existing blogs.

Oh. huh. gosh. I guess it’s not just about having a good conversation about your ideas _and_ others’ ideas is it? It’s about having _your_ own space, about your ideas, etc. etc. Which is totally fine. Great even. But once you acknowledge that it is, in part, about you, you have to remember that, for others, it’s going to be about them, and not just you. And then you have to remember, as Shirkey points out about the longtail, there is just so much time and energy to go around. If you get lots of readers at your blog and you are better than average, you are going to take away from the potential of other bloggers to have similar readerships. because there is only so much time and energy to freakin’ go around.

it’s built into the system. this is exactly how structural social inequality works. and you participate in it and think it right, good, normal, a-ok. but it’s not because it is built on a system of distributing scarce resources at the center of which is elevated the isolated and asocial individual: you. It glorifies your isolation and asociality. It makes you love it and think it is grand and then wonder why you are still lonely and feeling like you are not accomplishing any of that revolutionary goodness that you thought you should set out to accomplish.

this is WHY i keep saying: blogging to get readers to engage with _you_ is, gosh, participating in a system of inequality and, shockingly, you will end up reproducing it. blogging isn’t exactly a tool for revolution.