More Research

I read the article "Women and Chrildren Last: the Discursive construction of Weblogs" and I first thought I probably will not refer to this in my project but then I found some ideas that are pretty interesting. The jist of the article is that most bloggers tend to be teenage girls, yet middle-age men's blogs are more mainstream and viewed as more interesting than other blogs, thereby marginalizing the activities of women and teen bloggers and "reproducting societal sexism and ageism, and misrepresenting the fundamental nature of the weblog phenomenon." While this is interesting, I didn't see how it was relevant until I got to a later part of the article when the writer attributed this sexism, in part to the idea that qualities associated with males are mostly more "highly regarded" than those thought of as female and therefore "Such practices work to relegate the participation of women and other groups to a lower status in the technologically-mediated communication environment that is the blogosphere." Well this got me thinking about the differences I noted earlier between my style of writing as League Manager and my male friend who was League Manager before me. Previously I noted that he tended (and still does with baseball) to make the page somehow about himself, his team, his family, his vacation, his life, etc. while I went out of my way to take myself out of the picture in terms of what I was writing. I am not saying he is a "bad" person or a bad League Manager because of this trait. His pages are interesting to read, and I wonder if they are more or less interesting to others who maybe don't know him as well as I do. And then I started wondering if others viewed his pages as more relevant or more interesting than my pages. The article noted (and I have certainly heard this before) that discourse practices that are associated with men are externally-focused (not true in this case), substantive, intellectual, autoritative and potent, while the female discourse practices are viewed as "emotional, ultimately less important communicative activities. So, are my posts less interesting, less important, viewed in a different light than the male LM's page? I have no quesstions in my interview protocol about this topic. I might need to create some. Will league members tell me the truth? Am I putting them in a difficult position by asking?