4:39pm September 20, 2014

I just remembered something that I’m kind of glad seems to have died out.

At least I hope it has.

I hope mentioning it won’t resurrect it.

But basically there was this idea going around for awhile, that if your blogroll didn’t contain blogs by a member of every oppressed minority you could think of, then you were… bad, and probably bigoted against whatever group wasn’t represented on your blogroll.

I remember being distinctly uneasy, because while my blogroll was pretty diverse for a blogroll that only had five or six blogs on it… it only had five or six blogs on it.  And I remember wondering how the hell they expected me to follow enough blogs to even fulfill this requirement.

But it struck me even then as a horrible way to decide anything about someone.  Like… it’s really easy to go out and fill up your blogroll with the recommended number of people.  And that doesn’t mean you’ve done anything useful or special or good or right.  And it’s also really hard to sincerely fill up a really small blogroll with all the “right kinds” of people, because you may have totally different criteria for who you want in your blogroll, and you may have a tiny little blogroll that you don’t want to see get much bigger, and… just WTF.

But the reason I’m even bringing it up is because it’s one of those hare-brained ideas that people still seem really fond of coming up with, to test your social justice cred by measuring something totally irrelevant.  Or if not totally irrelevant, at least measuring something that doesn’t measure what they say it measures.

I’m looking at my blogroll from the time.  It’s literally got six blogs on it, by five people.  There is no way humanly possible to pass that test with a blogroll that small.  Although I did have some pretty diverse demographics for a blogroll that small.  It still… when I see something that says “If your blogroll doesn’t have at least one elderly person on it, I’m judging you,” I automatically cringe.  Because I remember when that was a big thing, that people would be “judging you” based on literally every demographic group that you could replace “elderly” with.  (And the sentence I quoted just now was pretty much verbatim from someone.)

And people would even get unfollowed or have their own blogs removed from people’s blogrolls over things like this, as I recall.  

Just… why make up standards like this?  I understand they were trying to make the point that it’s good to read blogs by a diverse group of people, but this is not the way.  It just isn’t.  And it gives me the creeps remembering it.  They often said things like “There’s absolutely no excuse for you to not have [insert group here] represented on your blogroll.”  I can think of a lot of really good excuses.  The very first one that comes to mind is that the idea of being added to someone’s blogroll just so that they’ll have a genderless person or a nonspeaking autistic person on their blogroll, and for no other reason, makes my skin crawl.  I don’t know why it didn’t make anyone else’s skin crawl… at least, anyone else that was saying anything.  (And people are always afraid to speak up in these situations, so maybe it was making lots of people’s skin crawl but nobody wanted to seem like the bad guy for bringing it up.)

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