Clyde Smith at Hip Hop Logic posted a link to this MIT survey on blogging usage. The results are quite interesting - Clyde was mostly noting how 36% of respondents got in trouble for stuff they put on their blogs, but I'm more interested in the racial breakdown of who blogs. Keep in mind, the survey has one of the strangest reporting models I've ever seen - a mix between geographic location and ethnicity but it doesn't parse it down between the two. So, for example, while the researcher has separate categories for "Asian" vs. "Asian American," he doesn't explain where people who identified as "Caucasian" came from. Maybe I'm missing something but as someone trained in sociological methodology, this seems like stunningly poor data management and analysis. Nonetheless, here's the results:
African-American: 1%
Asian (presumably not API): 4.1%
Asian American: 3.3%
Caucasian: 78.6%
Latino/Hispanic: 2.1% (presumably, these are Americans since there are not Latin American countries listed in his data sources)
Other: 7.8% (one would assume this category also includes people who "decline to state")
I can't do much with that "Caucasian" figure since this obviously includes Europeans in it and there's no way to tell which whites were American and which whites were from elsewhere. However, among the American groups, clearly, this points out some real disparities in either technological access or blogging tendencies (probably both). Given that 3x as many Asian Americans blog as compared to African Americans, and are 50% more likely to blog than Latinos, we (as an ethnic group) are pretty significantly over-represented in comparison to the general American population.
This doesn't necessarily surprise me since other data on technological use shows that APIs tend to have more access to computers than other groups and I'd also add that the over-representations of APIs in colleges (again, as compared to other ethnic groups) probably has a lot to do with that too. After all, it's not surprisingly that the survey says that practically 90% of all bloggers have at least a college education, if not MA or PhD. This all said, I also wonder if there's something particular to blogging that attracts Asian American interest. The armchair opinion might posit that given how we're silenced in most other areas of conventional media, our voices erupt through alternate sites (this is me giving a shout to Lisa Lowe basically). Hell, given that I run about three, four blogs, I guess there's something to be said to that but maybe that's because I have a massive ego vs. being API.
I've avoided weighing in on this massive why do hip-hop bloggers avoid gender topic that has been circulating around. It's not like I don't think the issue is important and I'm glad it was raised...I guess my cynical response is: what do you expect? Hip-hop, for all its progressive pretensions, is no less sexist than any other segment of society and its sexism tends to manifest in particularly misogynistic ways that continue to go unabated and unchallenged by the majority of listeners and boosters. The blogging world, especially given that 63% are men (again, according to that MIT survey), shouldn't be expected to be any better. The contradiction between having a hardcore political agenda/perspective and turning a blind eye towards sexism has been an underpinning of the feminist movement since day one. So much of the left is still under the influence of '60s movement politics, which tended to posit the needs of women as secondary to bringing on the revolution in race and class. I agree - that's total bullshit and alas, the blogging community is no less guilty than any other.
For some strange reason, Lowculture.com has a bunch of cat photos up. I'm not a bonafied "cat person" but both S and my last partner have cats so I've learned to live with them by default.
how do they get up there?
Speaking of Sharon, she just wrote a blog posting about the returning vogueness of Orientalism within popuilar culture - from Lost In Translation, to the Details debacle. But hey, don't call it a comeback, it's been here for years.
While I appreciate Asian films, I don't have the resources to become a true junkie. Thankfully, because of Filmbrain, I don't have to - I just let them tell me what's good. I want to see this new Miike film bad.
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