Whatosphere?

I dislike the word "blogosphere." Well, that's not quite right. Actually, I hate it. For one thing, it's a weird neologism that contributes to the degradation of our language. But that doesn't bother me that much really, because our language is already fairly far down that path.

What I actually object to is that it pretends to mean "all blogs everywhere; the universe of blogs" but it always secretly means "my blog and the handful of blogs I read." People who use the word "blogosphere," in my experience, don't act like they understand that there are more websites out there than they read. In fact, there are more out there than anyone could read. But I still see people claiming that "the entire blogosphere thinks this" and "the blogosphere is up in arms over that".

The effect is that a lot of blogs (mostly political blogs, for some reason) act like everyone reads the same set of websites as the blogger in question. I'll explain what I mean through a couple of examples.

There are two political blogs called Wonkette and Gawker. I first heard of them a month or so ago, when I suddenly noticed a lot of people criticizing them. I can't remember where it was, but somebody was going on about some sort of crypto-racism in the hipster style of these sites. I would have shrugged and said "So what? A couple of sites I've never heard of may or may not be racist?" but the implication was that everybody must naturally be reading them. But, you know, whatever. And then again a couple weeks ago, I was at The Rage Diaries and saw this entry referring to this piece in Slate.

As far as I can tell, the Slate article is supposed to be convincing be to stop going to Gawker and Wonkette because they're mean or something. I'm not sure, though, because it contains sentences like "Now, where I came from, if you intend to kill the puppy for fun, you must first make friends with it for a few days so there's a whiff of surprise when the slaughter arrives." I have no idea what he thinks he's talking about there. Likewise the reference to "meta-knowing, callow riposte[s]." My point here is that Jack Shafer (the Slate writer) seems to think everyone goes to the same blogs he does. Also, it's hard to write about blogs talking about other blogs without putting in a million links.

Here's another example. There's this site called Infinite Monkeys I go to because it's partly written by people from Teevee.org (see what I mean about the million links?). It's a conservative political blog. And it's pretty much the only one I read on a regular basis. I've only got so much time for internet surfing, so I choose to go to the sites run be people I (sort of) know. And from time to time, Infinite Monkeys goes on a Hugh Hewitt tear. They've got a quote from him at the top of their site, and they'll sometimes start quoting and linking him a lot. This confuses me, because I have absolutely no idea who Hugh Hewitt is. Not a clue. But in the Infinite Monkeys world, he's apparently a superstar.

And that's the thing. If someone on Infinite Monkeys says "The Blogosphere," they mean a group of blogs that includes Hugh Hewitt. I think. I mean, he might not have a blog; I seriously don't have any idea. But it Jack Shafer says "blogosphere," he means an entirely different group of sites, one which includes meta-knowing callow ripostes. I've glanced at both Wonkette and Gawker, and they seem . . . I don't know. They've got a lot of really short updates, and I don't quite get why people are going there constantly. I certainly wouldn't assume that everyone on the Internet considers them must-reads.

There have been a couple of times when I was linked to by sites I've never heard of. And sometimes, these have been sites that are really big, off in some corner of the Internet I've never been to. And that's a little weird, you know, because what with the Damn Hell Ass Kings and all, I tend to hang out in the same incestuous group of sites where people more or less know who I am. And when someone from a different incestuous group links to me, they don't know any of the sites I know, and vice versa. So that's the interesting and cool part of getting mysterious links.

The weird and annoying part is when a site that links to me thinks that because they've never heard of me, they're more important. This happened a couple of years ago, where I got an email out of the blue from someone complaining that I never linked back to them, and telling me. The thing is, I never knew I'd been linked to; this person (whose name I've forgotten) was so used to being the Important One, they assumed that I must have seen their site, noticed the link, and should have been falling on my knees wringing my hands in gratitude. Or there was this other time when a (different) Important Site I'd Never Heard Of noticed me and, in the process of linking to me, made this big deal about how strange it was that they'd never heard of me. And I thought, what's so odd about that? Lots of people have never heard of me.

Look, here's my point. If "blogosphere" is supposed to mean anything, it should mean All Blogs, not My Blog And The Blogs Of My Buddies. I mean no offense to any of the sites I've linked to (except Slate), but seriously -- if I was already reading all the sites you link to, I wouldn't need to be reading you.