Two posts and a blog award have gotten me thinking about popularity contests and their various guises. Over the past week, Mel over at Stirrup Queens has been posting about exclusion, and how things change with time. Also this week, I got my first Blog Award. I am thrilled to be included in the blog award club. It's like getting into the popular crowd at school. The one I was never in as a kid. To this day, I still get a rush when someone picks me out and includes me, and judging from Mel's posts and the comments I read, I doubt I'm alone in this feeling.
However, clubs and popular crowds have a major drawback: in order to be included, you are, by definition, required to exclude everyone not in the club. That's one main function of a club or a clique or a popular crowd--by definition, those groups are exclusive. This really bothers me, because I don't like to leave people out. I know what it feels like to be left out, and to take it personally and assume I did something wrong. With this blog award, even though I agonized over how to pick blogs to nominate, I stuck to the limit and nominated fifteen, which, obviously, left some people out.
How does one choose among so many excellent blogs? If I follow one set of criteria, I end up with a different set of blogs to nominate than if I follow another set of criteria. I wish I'd given myself more time to think things through before accepting and posting my award. If I'd thought about it longer, I might have done things differently. Today, when it's too late, I have the idea that I could simply have opened up the award to whomever came by my blog and wanted to claim it, rules be darned. No minimum, no maximum, accept by leaving a comment on my blog with a link to your blog. A self-award--sort of like Mel's Creme de la Creme. The only criteria being that you have read my blog.
Because, cool and fun as it is to belong to an invitation-only club, that rush of belonging comes at the expense of some peoples' exclusion. While I bask in the glow of being "chosen", I simultaneously cringe at the requirement that I select the next group of "chosen" blogs, because I'm still not choosing everyone. I still don't know the best way to solve the problem of my eternal desire to belong to an exclusive club without my conscience nagging at me, reminding me that those clubs exist to exclude people. It boils down to a struggle between the desire to feel special and the responsibility to be kind.
It leaves me wondering if these public, pay-it-forward blog awards are really so wonderful after all. They look inclusive, because of how exponentially they get awarded, but receiving one still depends on making the cut on someone else's list. To me, that makes them at least partially exclusive, no matter how many people eventually receive the award. What do you all think?
Yeah, I think the same thing about those. It really tickles me to get them because it means people read my blog sometimes. With this one, it was easy to pick 15 people because out of the 30 or so blogs I follow, only about 10 updated frequently/didn't have the award. Last time I had to pick 5 people and later, I thought of some others I could have picked. Maybe next time you could just do that open one? I like how Mel does it too!
ReplyDeleteHere from ICLW. I've been thinking a lot about Mel's post too, and the blogosphere can most definitely clique-y. It's weird because I think of the Internet as my refuge from that crap, but it's really not. Thanks for writing this. I think many can relate...
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