Influence is more than statcounter results.

In the (white) femblogosphere, the latest whitegirl idiocy is the Pandagon writer Amanda Marcotte not noticing racist cartoons being published in her book. I was fool enough to post a bit in the comments. The primary thing I got into commenting about was, well, stats and how they are a measure of influence. A hapless poster was insisting that no-one could critique Miss Mandy unless they had a top 1000 (by technorati standards) blog, or something along those lines. And I was floored, really, because one of the founding assumptions of the Internet (once it hit the public eye in the early and mid 90s) was that a person with ten readers could come to have as much influence as a corpo-website with 100,000.

So it’s kinda funny to me that there’s someone on Pandagon tooting the megacorp horn when speaking of feminism. Because influence goes far beyond how many hits you get. If you have a dozen devoted readers who take it offline, go out into the world and do something about your preferred topic, you have more political and social power than the person with a mainstream blog that gets a million hits a month (but everyone’s just trading the link and not actually propagating the information anywhere).

What’s interesting w/r/t feminism is that the very WOC who are constantly denigrated for not being ‘big bloggers’ have more INFLUENCE because their audiences are devoted and TAKE IT OFFLINE, regardless of size.

Shaquanda Cotton was released due to the efforts of numerous ‘tiny, insignificant’ blogs with readership in the dozens and hundreds (repeat readers), along with a few blogs with larger readership. But the core was those tiny little pulpits with small, devoted audiences– real-world, REAL influence that can’t be gained through traffic, but only through quality and shared goals.

Pandagon, Feministe, Shakesville, etc, of the femblogs may have the hits, but they’ve got no influence because their audiences read and stop there. The ‘blogs that don’t count’– their readers are so glad to find others sharing the goals and travails that they get out there and make changes happen. They make the world over, in positive disproportion to their stat counts.

And maybe that’s why the white fembloggers (and many of their commenters) hate the WOC fembloggers so much. The WOC’s audiences get out there and actually alter the world around them in positive and real ways, while their audiences just smile and pass the link on and congratulate themselves a bit over an ‘uplifting’ post they read.

It’s interesting that a subculture like feminism, which is supposedly about giving voice to the oppressed, is increasingly falling back on the rhetoric of corporations, who were proven wrong as soon as blogging started happening en masse and to some extent (albeit smaller) back in the days of plain old webpages.

There were innumerable small websites I recall from my early internet days that came to have huge influence because of small but devoted audiences. So I don’t put any stock in hits– I know they don’t mean so much online. Yahoo.com has more hits than Pandagon, but it’s hardly got more influence on the people level.

One person makes differences. As do five or ten or thirty. Critical masses are so much smaller than people invested in the establishment like to admit, because it would break the narrative that popularity is influence, when it doesn’t work that way on the internet. Just being there at all is influence, and as long as we’re there, working to connect with others, taking it offline and making it work, then we’re doing better than any corpo-site or blogger who thinks hits are all that matters.