Yesterday, Forbes published its annual web celebrity list and last night, we had a bit of chatter on Twitter about it. I promised a post to further explain my thoughts on the list. Here goes.
There’s more than one problem here, so let’s start with the most obvious. Do we really need yet another web celebrity list?
If we truly believe what we say, that social media is about more than celebrity or rank, that it is about the democratization of media, that the long tail is just as important as the mass market, then we need to put our money where our mouths are.
We need to look deeper than the A-list. And not be fooled by lists like this one that merely scratch the surface of the richness of the blogosphere.
Now, I am not at all surprised that Forbes takes the easy way out by pandering to our culture of celebrity by creating a list that seems more appropriate to PEOPLE or the STAR. It’s a chance to show that they are more than just a stodgy mainstream business publication. Oooh Perez Hilton in Forbes… who would have thought….
Unfortunately, this perpetuates a misconception about what social media is, and what it can become. What we can become as a result.
Not only is that a real shame, but also it goes a long way to explaining why so many companies get it wrong when they engage. If we treat social media just like everything else, why should we expect that they’d "get it?" That they’d understand the fundamental differences between mass markets and the long tail, between bloggers and journalists. And so on.
The other problem is the gender imbalance. The Forbes list, like so many others, suffers from an over-representation of white middle class men. Only four women out of the 25. That’s 16%, for the math jocks out there. That doesn’t match the demographics of either the US population or Internet users.
The Forbes list is merely one among many that suffers from this problem. In the tweet-around last night, Chris Baskind forwarded me yet another recent list that purported to summarize the definitive blog posts of 2007. Just as bad. I counted 38 different authors (many of the same ones as in the Forbes list by the way) and 5 women. That’s about 13%.
Quite often, these lists mention the same women. Not to take away from their work and significant contributions, but there truly are more than a handful of women engaged in social media. And don’t get me started on the fact that the "definitive posts" post attributes CommonCraft’s great "RSS explained" video to Lee Lefever alone. No mention of business and life partner Sachi LeFever.
Now, we could say that these are stupid, lame lists, and why would women and minorities want to be on them anyway?
Unfortunately, that would miss the point of true equality.
True equality means that women and minorities should be adequately represented everywhere.
Certainly anything that claims to be a definitive summary of web influence.
And even lame web celebrity lists.
Tags: Forbes, gender, web celebrity list, a-list