By some of the links I have put up today, you can tell I have been catching up on my blogospheric meanderings. I just finished reading a post by Bob Geiger and I laughed out so loud I had just had to write about it.

In Here's How Fringe I Am, Fred Thompson [1], Bob describes his fringieness. Here's a sample :

• Attended my son's middle-school orientation. He's "graduating" from elementary school this Thursday -- though, oddly enough, exhibiting few signs of being a "fringe element" despite having me for a father -- and on that day, our lunatic activities will center around taking many pictures of him and his friends and going for ice cream afterwards. I personally plan on ordering the Cookies and Communist Crunch.




• Volunteered at a local community clean-up effort to rid our town of the trash spawned by a predominantly-Democratic community that clearly hates America. Went to weenie roast afterwards… Put catsup on my hotdog to show how much I despise American values.

My favorite :

• Took my son to the driving range with me. While we whacked golf balls, we discussed our lack of family values and my little boy stunned me with this question: "Dad, why haven't you been divorced a bunch of times like Fred Thompson and the other Republican presidential candidates?" "Now son," I said. "Senator Thompson's only been divorced once. You're thinking of Rudy Giuliani or Newt Gingrich."

Of course, I can not not quote the punchline : So that's about it. I only regret that we didn’t have time to burn an American flag this week.

Harrumph!

I think it was in December of '05 that I met Bob Geiger [2]. I was invited to a party at his house by Bob Fertik [3] along with a chunk of the political blogosphere that's stationed here in New York. Lindsay [4] was there (the Beyerstein one, not the Lohan), so was Jenn [5].

I think that was the first time I met Scott Lemieux [6] and I totally embarrassed him with a moment of fangirlishness over his awesome writing on abortion law. Jeff Tiedrich of Smirking Chimp [7], confirming my theory that you're not a true net native [8] if you don't know who Christian Crumlish [9] is or if, at least, he doesn't know who you are. If you don't know who he is, the you have to read his book [9]. It's freaky how almost of the pioneers of the net have one or two degrees of separation from Xian.

We had chips, dips, some soda (because I was driving and under my ZipCar [10] contract nobody outside of my family (ie, the patriarchy himself [11]) can't drive the car and well, Michael [12] was having too much of a good time and so I went the soda route.

That's how fringe and radical the party was.

I mention this exactly to prove Bob's point : It's just too darn easy to dismiss people by calling them fringe or to explain why you won't discuss ... ahem ... the alienating semantics behind the term 'unpaid work' or the politics of education because you don't agree with that person's point of view.

Which is why I am calling Radical Fringe the meme of the month.

It's not just Thompson using the 'fringe' or 'radical' moniker to dismiss bloggers on the left. Bloggers in the left are using it to either assert themselves (I mean, hello, Radical Women of Color bloggers!) or to dismiss people who, as Sylvia aptly wrote in Radicalism vs. Progressivism [13], reject the adherence to dogmatic slogans and formations of factions.

Which brings to one of the most persuasive tools we have now defining the "mainstream" and the "fringes" in the blogosphere. I am talking about Memeorandum [14].

By the way, I am always fascinated by how memeorandum hand-picks "the blogs that matter" for what I believe is the explicit purpose of proving that lockstep formation.

Here's an example :

Here's an example of blogs from the right :

Interestingly enough, here's an example with feminist bloggers :

Disclosure : culturekitchen is one of those hand-picked blogs which occasionally appears as if it were an accident lawyer chasing the random car crash. Yet it's precisely because it seems so random when we're up there that I am pointedly aware of how what is supposed to be a "meme recording" and "trend tracking" tool is in truth an excuse for creating digital border fences. Because stories like this [15], this [16] or this [17], never make it to not even the bottom of the page of memeorandum [18].

And, by the way, I think it's really interesting that the guy that created the site happens to be latino. Just saying.

Now, I think that a tool like memeorandum can be extremely useful if it were truly unfiltered and if it were really tracking memes. Which is why, I am going to linkbait David Sifry [19] of Technorati [20] to see if he'll end up on the blog --or I'll try to get Micah [21]to drag his ass here.

Heh.

The problem with memeorandum is that it has too much respect for "authority" and too little actual interest in not just the story but the ecology in which those units of cultural protoplasma (as in memes) is re-generated [22].

Take Bob's post. I got to it through that site. Under his featured headline were a small posse of bloggers, most from the left but some from the right supposedly following the story.

Were memeorandum truly about tracking memes, his post would not have been the center of attention, yet it would have been prominently displayed around the ecology of blogs that have been writing about "radical" and "fringe" all month long through blogwars, some serious flame attacks --even one blogger resigned from a job as part of the narratives developed this month around "the fringe", "the definition of progressive", "how to be a radical" or for that matter, "being a true conservative".

Tracking true memes though, is not sexy, lest you actually knock out of the map the big media outlets and "citizen influencers" that give a raison d'etre to what is basically a P.R and marketing business in the first place.

Unless, of course, you can create some pretty maps of blog relationships (are you listening David?) around tags and/or topics in a way that would make sense of the narratives developing around them. Maybe making heavier the blogs and/or publications that have written more about said topic-in-progress while newer blogs entering the narrative with more traffic (but less "taggyness") become bigger yet thinner.

That way people would be able to see how central or fringey, heavy or light, mainstream or radicalicious the blogs are at a particular moment in time.

As to me? I honestly don't believe in labeling myself as a radical. I like the missionary position too much (actually the Kama Sutra "yawn"), I have been with the same guy for a cabillion years even though he drives me to distraction, and I don't only love my kids but actually admit to liking them.

On the other hand ...

I don't believe in compulsory full time attendance to schools. And I believe all parents should be given tax incentives for doing it themselves, however they choose.

I don't believe any reference to any religion should appear in public property, ie: courts. Yet I believe all religious texts should be studied in history and literature classes --especially in public school.

Immigration should be open to everybody and anybody who wants to come into the country, no questions asked. And that includes giving full amnesty to undocumented residents, and full access to schools, hospital and social services, especially if they have worked in this country and paid their taxes like anybody else.

I also believe that people have a right to have guns, I just don't believe they should be able to use them easily.

And there's the issue of abortion : I believe personhood starts when a woman decides the embryo she is carrying is either her's to keep or her's to give away to another person to adopt --but I don't believe a person should be convicted for double homicided if they kill a woman with child.

What is most important for me in this game of definitions is the fact that I am not essentially radical or essentially on the fringe or essentially any other label people may want me to take on.

Yet I do believe that I am each and every one of the 3,000+ tags and over 10,000 posts and comments I have left on the blogosphere through my blogs.