The Washington Post does a short article on religious blogs which includes mention of St. Blogs and especially the first member of St. Blogs (she also coined the term) Kathy Shaidle of Relapsed Catholic. They under reported the size of the St. Blogs parish by about 300 hundred since they said there were only about 100 lay people along with priests, canon lawyers, choir directors. [Link via Legislating Gremlins]
One thing I thought odd in the article was this statement.
Because the overwhelming majority of people who have the time and equipment necessary to blog are white middle-aged, well-educated and affluent, there is a conservative tinge to the blogosphere, said Lynn Schofied , a new-media scholar at the University of Colorado whose research focuses on the internet.
The only equipment necessary to blog is any device with an internet connection and the will to opine. I know Quenta Nârwenion blogs from the computer at a public library. My impression of the blogospere is not that it skews middle-aged but that the vast majority if bloggers are in their 20s or 30s. I also wonder how many bloggers in St. Blogs would see themselves as affluent, though I would say most are well-educated (not necessarily via educational institutions.) But maybe I should not complain to much (being a white, middle-age, high school educated, middle-class blogger) is that often you do not find the words well-educated and conservative in the same paragraph in the WaPo.
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“Because the overwhelming majority of people who have the time and equipment necessary to blog are white middle-aged, well-educated and affluent, there is a conservative tinge to the blogosphere, said Lynn Schofied , a new-media scholar at the University of Colorado whose research focuses on the internet.”
We are all rich, white racists you see so nobody should listen to us. People should instead get their news from the MSM which can be trusted to provide objectivity.
Are you kidding me? I know tons of tweens (mostly college students) who blog, and blog on St. Blogs.
In fact, who here is middle-aged? Do middle-age people know how to use a computer? My parents have a hard enough time finding the “on” button. (I love my mom and dad!)
Time to go post a picture of my cat … 😉
I would think that maybe the WaPo writer could have done a google search on stblogs? Oh, wait, that means fact checking – and we all know how good the conventional news media do on that issue!Shoot, I have more than 100 listings on my blogroll, and I don’t have all of stblogs by any means.
I guess that I am white, middle-aged, and well educated – but I sure wouldn’t consider myself affluent!
Yeah, liberals don’t feel the urge to blog because they don’t need to vent – because everything in the media is going their way anyway! Seriously, I look at the Boston Glob and see editorials excoriating the bishops for teaching that abortion is wrong; I look in Arizona and I see that the papers must berate the bishop for allowing even one Tridentine-order Mass in his diocese; I look in the WaPo and I see secular feminists attacking the Pope’s new document which they didn’t even bother to report on except for the anti-Catholic editorial! You don’t really need to set up a counter-culture when your culture is already established. The exception that proves the rule is jcecil3: he is the counter-counter-cultural element in the established counter-culture of St. Blog’s.
Uh, at what age are we considered middle aged? My body tells me I hit that stage a few years back …
I must show this to my sons, whose mental image of my computer skills resembles Granny Clampitt’s hollering into the wall-mounted crank telephone with the hand-held earcup. What the dickens is this woman on? If she’d browse Blogspot at random, she’d see that the majority of bloggers are young, illiterate, and liberal.
Lauren – I’m middle-aged, for one, and have been for fifteen years. If middle age is to be regarded as a middle period of life, and not, as is the custom of jittery Boomers, as an ever-receding theoretical midpoint, it starts at thirty and runs to sixty. After that, one is old. This is a good thing: youth is incredibly overrated. The only things I would willingly accept back from my youth are my knees and my back.
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