WIRED Blogs: Beyond the Beyond

Sterling makes a very interesting statement about the l33t in the blogging community.  The latest numbers I’ve seen are claiming that digital divide is closing.  Is it?  Well, the bits I’ve seen do show that more individuals are gaining access to computers and the Internet.  But this article helps show that it doesn’t really mean the individuals who have barely crossed the chasm are capable (technologically or with sufficient training and support) of meaningful contribution.  And certainly not on a regular basis.
In this case, the argument is how the blogosphere is very top-heavy.  Bloggers’ education and income will be in a higher bracket.  I’m willing to bet the majority of individuals are also white.   As such, the blogosphere is a good beginning to direct representation from the general community.  However, until technology reaches closer to that 99% coverage which will allow us to datamine the blogging community for a better consensus on the state of affairs in the use of technology.

The real benefit is how simplistic the creation and maintenence of blogs is becoming.  I’m assuming once the $100 computers hit the American market and cause a massive shift in the access of poorer households to access the Internet,  combined with an ease of blog access, will enable an uprising of individual bloggers from lower-income and possibly wider age range to add their voices to this current trend.

The question will become: once you give these individuals that level of voice, what will it empower?  This causes me to recall a discussion I had wth Doug Winiarski about how early settlers, in pre-American society, began to have “visions” of Heaven.  Since the religious elite claimed to be the only path to Heaven, dissenters rebelled by speaking of visions in which they visited Heaven and were shown a book containing the names of those for whom a place was already reserved.

This lent momentum to breaking the theological stranglehold the Priests and Ministers held over their population.  In turn, this empowerment, in the next generation, is believed to have created the spark which fueled the flames of the American Revolution.  —allow me to say I am probably butchering this ideal, but think I have the basic tenents of the theory down.

What then will allowing the poor and marginilized groups in America create in the next generation? Only time will tell…