The Gatekeepers Are Gone

Micah Sifry, Editor of the Personal Democracy Forum

A famous New Yorker cartoon shows two dogs sitting in front of a computer, with one of them saying to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows that you're a dog."

Indeed, if you want to hide your identity from others, or play at being someone else, there's nothing stopping you from doing that in cyberspace. If you are a person with a particular identity in real life - a black man or a Latina or a gay Buddhist, in the online arena, you are only what you choose to reveal to others.

For example, I'm Jewish, but unless you can guess that from my name, the only signifiers you have about my background are the ones I choose to post on the Web.

So, while race is already a complicated subject for Americans to discuss, in online politics, things get a bit more complicated. Things are changing for the better, due to a combination of factors, including the rise of Barack Obama and assertive new networks of bloggers of color. But we're hardly in anything like a "post-race" environment online.

One of the great things about the political blogosphere is that it is very open and meritocratic. For very little money, anyone can start a blog and post their thoughts on the Web. Of course, the annual cost of a broadband connection is still a barrier that disproportionately leaves out the poorest Americans, and if you're struggling to make ends meet you don't have much time to spend expressing yourself online.

But if you want to join in the conversation online, it's a lot easier than, say, getting yourself published on a newspaper's op-ed page. The gatekeepers are gone.

However, because most communication online has, until the rise of more visual sites like Facebook and YouTube, been done via text, signifiers like race are often absent from political conversations. You can't necessarily tell, just from reading a blogger's words, if she's black or white or some other race or ethnicity.

And so, as the blogosphere has grown into a major new media force, with some political bloggers building readerships bigger than some cable TV shows, there's been an odd color-blindness to a lot of online activity.

Whites may not realize this, but we often make an unspoken assumption about the people we are reading online, which is that they too are white, or, to put it another way, without color. If you don't think this is true, ask yourself, "How many of the bloggers I read regularly are black?" If you don't know the answer, it's probably because you've been making this unconscious assumption.

And I can't prove it, but I suspect some bloggers who are black or Latino don't necessarily make a point of sharing that information because they sense that the conversation online is somehow colorless, and if they want to succeed in gaining attention from readers, or not be marginalized, it might be better not to stand out so much.

When pondering the dynamics of race online, I can't help but think of the old Richard Pryor joke about the lack of black characters in science-fiction movies about the future: was it an oversight, or were white movie-makers sending blacks a hint? Of course, since Pryor made that joke about the 1976 movie, "Logan's Run," blacks and other ethnic groups have come to be much better represented in sci-fi.

Things are changing as well in online politics. There have always been bloggers of color, but now the conversation seems to be expanding and reaching critical mass. Terms like "Afrosphere" and "blackroots" are taking hold as ways to describe black bloggers who are political activists. Color of Change, an activist organization modeled on MoveOn.org, has more than 400,000 online members, and the blackroots played a huge role in putting the case of the Jena Six on the national stage.

The audience for political information online is also becoming more diverse and representative of the country as a whole. For a long time, blacks and Hispanics have lagged behind whites in their use of the Internet. But according to a June 2008 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 40 percent of all black adults and 43 percent of all Hispanics went online this year to look for news and information about politics or the presidential campaigns - the same level as whites.

A lot of this shift is probably in response to Barack Obama's successful primary run. But now that blacks and Hispanics are participating online in such large numbers, I think it's a safe bet that they're going to keep looking for news and commentary about politics written by voices they can identify with. What that means is a bigger market for black and Latino bloggers, and hopefully, a much richer and more interesting conversation for everyone to participate in, whatever their background.