When social classes collide : More on the MT blogtercation

Liza Sabater

Note : I posted this first at the typepadistas directory

Shelly Powers of Burningbird hits it over the head once again with her comment about social class, the MT debacle and social software scientists (and makers). Her post, I believe, sums up the lack of distinctions when speaking of social software users:

According to Clay, this really isn’t about money. It’s about the fact that we users are regressed infants, crying out when the bottle is taken away. Or is that chimps losing a banana?

It is impossible for me to understand how Clay can disregard what many of us have been saying so completely as to not only miss the mark, but to do so in about the most offensive way possible. But then I had to look at who he socializes with in the social software arena, to better understand where Clay is coming from: he’s used to interacting with people who are comfortably situated, and therefore has no idea–none– about how the difference between $70.00 and $150.00 (or $700.00!) can generate such a reaction.

After all, have we not spent the last year listening to the social software people as they talk about this trip to London and that trip to Zurich? How many conference reports have we had to sit through, or photos of dinners where all the faces looking amazingly alike from event to event? How many posts focused on this new iPod, or that new cellphone?

Didn’t Dave Winer demonstrate this so aptly? Calling us ‘childish’ because we reacted in shock to the license prices, while saying that after all a dinner costs $100.00, a hotel $150.00 –why are we bitching about software that costs $70.00?

These people, they don’t have a clue about how the rest of us live. They don’t know that for most of us, the difference between $70.00 and $150.00 is the difference between making a car payment or not; paying for tuition or your kid’s dentist bill; or paying one’s health insurance premium; or even making the rent or buying food.

Dinner cost $150.00? My big treat is to take my roommate and myself out for a concrete at the frozen custard place, and I can tell you, we drive ourselves, do not take a cab, and it costs less than $10.00. It also doesn’t come around that often, either.

Liz gave us the benefit of the doubt, that we were complaining about the cost because many of us could no longer afford to use the product, and we were given no warnings that such price increases were just around the corner. And she did so gracefully, in such a way that there is no loss of dignity–that we’re all shocked about the costs, we’re all in this together.

What Clay has done, is rubbed our noses in the fact that there are those that have, and those have not; and then made an assumption that everyone is a ‘have’ and therefore the complaints were about emotional investment not the cost.

Next time Clay, leave your assumptions at home with your Gucci case, next to your new iPod and the tickets from your last trip. You’ll excuse me as I go back to the free software us poor folk use.

I don't know how well off is Shirky, what with him being a college professor and all. Still, this reminds me of a conversation I had a while back about real estate. At a party, I was talking about how Mark and I were looking at different towns looking for a good yet cheap area to buy a house. I talked about ROI and mortgage points and other "real estatey lingo", putting to work the bit of knowledge and insight I had acquired by way of a RE workshop at Baruch College. Well, one millionaire looks at me, dead pan serious, and says, "but town XYZ is a steal. You can buy a whole brownstone for a little over a mil".

Talk about non-awareness of social class.

I believe that because I knew how to speak about investments, at that moment I became one of "them", one of the "haves". Why? Because so many "have nots" (me included) know shit about making money that is not earned through labor. I spoke like one of them, therefore I WAS ONE OF THEM.

This is what I feel has happened with the MT debacle. Many of the Yea-sayers were either people with a vested interest in SixApart (through direct employment or 3rd party partnership), where or had been owners of their own software company or where people using commercial licenses. The others? People who would rather give the money than bother migrating to another platform (not many of those, by the way).

Here's another item to add to Shelley's post: Some Latino and Black people remarked at the NYCBlogger's meet that there were, you betcha, no Negro or Latino (of Latino Negroes, for that matter). It is not that they were racist but as a commenter said on anziblog v4.0 | Blogging Is So New York City, he researched bloggers in Harlem and had found that most use blogging software other than MT, which is the blogging software par excellance of the blogeratti (maybe with Blogger and Radio coming in second and third place). And if the blogware you are using (ie: Blogspot) does not offer RSS unless you pay for it, you betcha a lot of folk are not going to be read by the blogeratti.

Again, if you speak like them, blog like them and RSS like them, YOU ARE ONE OF THEM. It's herd instinct. Nietzsche points to this phenomenon in aphorism #116 of Gay Science.

Herd instinct. - Wherever we encounter a morality, we also encounter valuations and an order of rank of human impulses and actions. These valuations and orders of rank are always expressions of the needs of a community and herd: whatever benefits it most - and secondmost, and thirdmost - that is also considered the first standard for the value of all individuals. Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function. The conditions for the preservation of different communities were very different; hence there were very different moralities. Considering essential changes in the forms of future herds and communities, states and societies, we can prophesy that there will yet be very divergent moralities. Morality is herd instinct in the individual. The Nietzsche Channel: The Gay Science

Just as the millionaire assumed I had a million for a house because I spoke about ROIs and just as many in the blogosphere would not consider to look outside of their immediate links (through blogware, aggregated blogs, trackback buddies), one can say that in the blogtercation surrounding MovableType much has been assumed about the core of power users.

In other words, just because we talk like the haves, blog like the haves, aggregate like the haves it does not mean we have the same income levels. Which goes to show that even in the abstract environment of the web, social class affects the way we work and weave our social networks.

NB: Check out c u l t u r e k i t c h e n: The Great Blogtercation of 2004 : Or on social networks and data mining, the first of four posts about the MT debacle has changed business and social networking in the blogosphere.