A while back, Mike Sanders suggested that anyone who failed to see the war in the Middle East pretty much the same way he did should let him know, so he could delete them from his list of bloggers. Everyone who didn't so declare themselves could hencforward be inferred to share Mike's position.
In one stroke, in an emotional moment, Mike had politicized his blogroll. He'd converted what had seemed like a fairly casual list of "people he liked to read" into a list of "retroactively enlisted supporters of Mike Sanders' views of the Middle Eastern conflict."
A short time later, he revised that demand for allegiance, and decided to retain links to people with whom he clearly disagreed on this issue. (I'm working here from memory. I can't find this episode now on his blog, but if anyone has a link, I'll put it here.)
Now that I have been mentioned in his ongoing dialogue with AKMA on complexity, I want to say what I didn't say then: that trying to transform a loose set of Web acquaintances into a political party seems to me to be, at best, ill-advised.
It is the interjection of a very powerful absolutism into the stream of ordinary and conflicted everyday life.
Decreeing someone to be a friend or foe based upon their position upon one specific geopolitical issue can strike those so decreed as an arbitrary and usurpatory imposition of power. One had thought that a rich variety of threads - strands of the tapestry of relationship, if you will - mattered. Suddenly one learns that only one thread matters - everything else is meaningless. To those being assigned to one or another narrow cell, this obliteration of relational (and conversational) complexity descends like an act of violence.
Frankly, the whole blogrolling thing will always be suspect, since it implies that there has been an act of judgment without expressed criteria. Often we link to people whom we find interesting; only, undoubtedly each of us has her or his own virtually unique notion of "interesting."
I for one am troubled by bloggers who link to others who, upon analysis, turn out to all share certain traits of an easily identifiable class - i.e., they're all 14-year-olds who rollerblade, have tattoos covering 80% of their epidermis, and drink Mountain Dew. Or, they're all lawyers, or Unitarian ministers, or BigMedia Columnists Blogging on the Side. Where is the random, the delight, the enriching pleasure of being diverted by someone who you don't really understand, or agree with? Where, in short, is the life?
