Old patterns in new media

Over the last couple of days I have been butting my head into the "where are the women XXXXX" issue again. First at bloggblogg, the Norwegian blog discussion blog, where Elise writes (in Norwegian) about white men in the blogosphere.

I can't wrap my head around the male-dominance of the blogosphere, because I just don't see those white men. I see that the newspapers love linking to white men, and I see that the stories of some famous bloggers are about white men, but the blogs I read are not.

My hypothesis is that the white male dominance exists among the people who write about the blogosphere in the mainstream media, not in the actual blogosphere. If the people who write about blogs only read the blogs of men who address topics the original writer was interested in, and link to others with similar views, the silent majority will never speak, and we have a spiral of silence, as described by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann.