I had never really thought about the word exclusive until Trish's comment to the previous entry...
The general societal perception of something "exclusive" seems to be positive. People want to join exclusive clubs - they are "hot" and being accepted means that you, by association, are "special."
But, I just thought about the word itself.
Even if you have noble ideals and are only trying to create a community of people that share a similarity - by definition, an "exclusive" community will exclude people.
That was definitely NOT my intention in creating the "Bloggers Over Forty" WebRing. The intention was to create an inclusive group - a group that included a group of people that had been excluded, or at least overlooked, from all of the other "themed" WebRings.
There are WebRings that attempt to be "all inclusive" - i.e. they don't intentionally exclude anyone, but even those rings are exclusive. Many of them exclude "offensive" sites. Of course, that begs the question of what the definition of offensive is - and regardless, it is exclusionary. And all of them, by definition, exclude anyone who doesn't have a presence of some sort on the web. They also exclude any site that isn't willing - for whatever reason - to include the navigation code for that ring on their site.
There's a good lesson here. I don't know what the answer is, but at the very least, it makes you think; and that is the first step on the road to enlightenment, isn't it?
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Posted by David at September 22, 2002 08:12 AM | Categorized under: Commentary