my thoughts on this on my blog

These words read to either brush aside the academic nature of the blog awards, and cast it as a big embracing party

That’s actually precisely what was good about the awards, something I noted in an entry. For some time, the ‘sphere was composed of exclusive little cliques whose members you had to suck up to just to widen your readership. For most, it was almost like mutual masturbation — the only readers the less popular blogs had were close blogger friends; it was stagnant. Now I’ve got my own (inconsequential) bone to pick with how things were run, but congratulations — from any source — are in order for the organizers of this and similar events, because it has opened up the community a bit, although there is still a certain amount of elitism going around as a result. Pero one step back, two steps forward, IMO.

As for brushing aside the academic nature of the blog awards, well, I believe that for as long as the judges and organizers themselves are disqualified, it will never really be academic.

Hi Happy,

I didn’t realize until now what a big deal this “blogging community” thing is to some people; I heard about some blog parteeh from Luis a few months back, and Gelay, who used to host me, was nominated for a Blog Award, but I didn’t think too much of it.

Now people are arguing over the politics of it like it’s the middle ages. It’s so strange; blogging has always just been some form of writing for me.

I agree with you that blogging is a right, and that everyone who has something to say (and god knows you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t) should be able to blog if he or she wants to.

But I also think that blogging is, fundamentally, an extremely personal medium; you do it not so much as to gain entry to whatever partee, to get nominations for whatever award. You blog because you want to write whatever crap you want to write, regardless of whoever reads you or not. For instance, I find that it’s an easier way to communicate with my friends rather than make a summary email of my week. I think that should take precedence over one’s sentiment about some community that is, as you pointed out, decidedly elitist when it theoretically should not be.

I mean, it must be the shits to have gone through what JJ went through. But that’s why I tend to steer clear of anything to which the term “blogging community” is attached; the term itself carries a certain weight of self-importance that I find unnecessary for something as basic as writing.

“Elitism” extrapolates it a bit too much. Yugatech has always been, and will most likely always be, inclusive. His intentions were to make amends, but in the process (possibly less circumspect than he ought to have been) managed to acknowledge the class structures that are systemic in our culture, and permeate this subculture of bloggers.

What drove JJ nuts was that, in my belief, he had imagined that the democratic and inclusive nature of blogging would transcend the virtual into the real. That is impossible, of course.

Bvest (Happy)