Hierarchy, meritocracy, the blogosphere, and the real world.

Those who follow the political blogs more closely than I do were probably aware eons ago that some of the A-list political bloggers significantly trimmed their blogrolls (while dubbing it, strangely enough, a blogroll “amnesty”). Others, like Terrance at the Republic of T (who is as close to the Platonic form of Serious and Engaging Blogger as any blogger of whom I’m aware), took note of this just recently, with a thougtful post about the interactions of the various “tiers” of the blogosphere and the ways hierarchies get entrenched. Chris Clarke and Pam Spaulding also wrote insightfully about this (and I find it reassuring that these smart and informed people are just now examining an issue which a lot of people might deem “so yesterday”).
Anyway, the reason I want to weigh in on the great blogroll purge is that I see a connection to issues that Zuska raised recently about the community — and hierarchies — within the scientific world.

Zuska’s post, part of a series on life as a “leak” from the science and technology pipeline, deals with some disagreements about what it means to be a scientist — whether scientist identifies active participation in a particular sort of career, or whether it’s more like an identity as a person that one can maintain regardless of employment status. Sorting this out, Zuska notes that one of the challenges in the community of science is that there are lots of people doing good science in places where they end up being invisible to the rest of the community:

I think arguing for the strong definition of scientist as only someone who does research in a laboratory is a form of border-guarding that does not serve women and minorities well. Women traditionally have been, and continue to be, found doing science in unlikely or unofficial settings…. We have an academic system where women are to be found disproportionately in untenured and non-tenure track positions, and now we want to declare that someone in a lecturer position is not a scientist? I’m not buying it…
I think if we acknowledge that scientists are to be found doing many things besides just working at a bench, then we are spreading the wealth, so to speak. By not limiting “scientist” to the exclusive academic boy’s club, we recognize the real scientific work that women and minorities are doing outside the academy.

Closely connected to the border-guarding, of course, is the issue of why the hierarchies are in place, and how the people at the top of the hierachies see them:

Ryan said:

If you (pretend to) do science and aren’t funded to do research in peer reviewed journals, there is a reason for that, its because your peers think your work is crap. I am being extremely blunt here because this is the reality of the situation.

Ah, the naivete of youth! There are, of course, a myriad of reasons why you may not be funded to do your research, none of which have anything to do with the quality of your work. This is perhaps the best reason for not defining scientist as those who do research, because those who do research depends upon those who can convince the powers that be to give them money and space. And since politics – of all sorts – plays such a role in these decisions, I’m not comfortable with letting politics decide who gets to be a scientist and who does not.

Put another way: There is a deep need, especially on the part of scientists who have successfully secured positions, funding, high impact publications, and the esteem of their peers, to see the system as a meritocracy. Those who produce quality scientific work will be recognized (because we are frightfully objective, we scientists), and those who do not will simply be weeded out. Sure, with limited resources (in terms of positions, funding dollars, journal pages, etc.) the competition will be fierce, but it’s completely fair, and the people who deserve it will be the winners in the system.
And here’s where I’m seeing a strong parallel to the attitude taken by some of the A-listers in the blogosphere. They seem committeed to the idea that they got where they are purely on the merits of their writing — that they deserve to be on top — and that any other blogger who deserves it will make it, too, without any special help from the people currently at the top of the hierarchy. I think Terrance’s description is apt:

On the one hand, they seem to be fully aware of the power of their blogrolls, when guys like Aravosis, Atrios, Kos and Bowers hold forth at length about why they aren’t going to link to some blogs. On the other they seem to deny that they hold any such power, like Kos’ claim that he’s not a gatekeeper (though Skippy says Kos is a gatecrasher who’s closing the gate behind him), though the “blogroll purge” is kind of like closing the gate.
Sure the blogs that were cut can still be found, but they won’t be getting the kind of traffic that comes from having a link on Kos’ blogroll. And that’s partially because many of the readers at Kos at other major blogs are like the people I mentioned in the scenario above: they’re looking where everyone else is looking, because everyone else is looking there, and everyone else can’t be wrong. By extension, if there was something worth looking at somewhere else, then everyone would be looking at it already. And if they look at anything else, it will probably be what the “authorities” (to borrow a concept from Technorati) tell them to look at, in the form of a link.

Acknowledging the hierarchy — and the power you wield as someone near the top of it — is in tension with maintaining the claim that you got to your position near the top purely on the merits. If you acknowledge that some of you success had to do with help you may have gotten (of a sort that you are not inclined to give to others — ’cause if they’re good enough, they don’t need your help), or that some of it may have been luck, then you can’t take your esteemed position as conclusive evidence that you’re really that good. Indeed, you might be in a position where you’d have to acknowledge that others who may be just as good as you (or better) are out there and unrecognized. You might have to come to grips with the idea that you cannot indefinitely defend you position at the top, at least not on the basis of your merit alone.
Let me quote myself from a comment I left on Pam’s post:

It is a big blogosphere, so I think the assumption that quality will always rise to the top and find an audience is over-optimistic. There’s a good bit of luck involved. People *don’t* have infinite time to read the blogs, so they have to make choices, and how they make the choice of what to read is usually at least a little arbitrary. That means that little blogs can’t be presumed to suck any more than big blogs can be presumed to be paragons of excellent writing and well-reasoned argument. The blogosphere is no more a perfect meritocracy than the meat-world is.

If we view traffic or Google page rank, or Technorati or TTLB ecosystem standing as a measure of the success of a weblog, that’s fine, as long as we don’t confuse “success” so measured with whether a blogger is doing good writing or thinking, taking on issues that matters, or building a vibrant community. You can do all of these things and still not be “on the radar” of the bloggerati.
Why the need to believe that there is a meritocracy in action is so strong is a little bewildering. Given the number of blogs, no one with the spatiotemporal constraints of a human being could read them all on a regular basis. Necessarily, even the most voracious blog consumer reads only a fraction of what’s out there. How, then, could we deny that there are most likely excellent blogs worth reading that we don’t even know about?
That we do triage so that our blog reading is cut down to an (almost) managable level is nothing shameful. That, in the process, we may be reinforcing hierarchies (including some hierarchies we might have hoped to leave in the meat-world rather than schlepping them with us into cyberspace) is something that I’m less comfortable about. The hierarchies are less harmful, I think, if we acknowledge just how arbitrary they are and make regular efforts to mix them up a little — sharing our luck with the hidden gems we happen upon, for example.
If we can undermine the myth of the meritocracy in the blogosphere, maybe we’ll be in a better position to effectively challenge that myth in the real world, too.