Stephen Colbert definitely deserves a hugo! He did some excellent SF over the course of the show. I wonder if we could get him a nom for his recent interview with Neil about Pluto? (I also think Stephen is too much of a native of SF fandom and too much of a gentleman to ever think about campaigning for one. Unless he could satirically egg on something grassroots.)
I don't know that the worldcon makeup is that much less representative now than it used to be, though. Certainly the Worldcon in the Golden Age wasn't giving awards to comics, for example. And there was always a huge amount of diversity in the readership that wasn't well represented by congoers - if you look at, for example, the letter-columns of old issues of Astounding in the 50s, you see a much better gender ratio and class diversity than you do in the memberships of those old cons. And that's after the letters have been winnowed by male editors. But the internet is making that non-con-going segment a lot harder to ignore and a lot harder to exclude from the core, so even as the cons are getting more diverse, their lagging diversity is a lot more visible.
Also, of course, there's just a lot more people now, and therefore a lot more stuff being published so it's a lot harder to feel like you've got a handle on everything.
no subject
I don't know that the worldcon makeup is that much less representative now than it used to be, though. Certainly the Worldcon in the Golden Age wasn't giving awards to comics, for example. And there was always a huge amount of diversity in the readership that wasn't well represented by congoers - if you look at, for example, the letter-columns of old issues of Astounding in the 50s, you see a much better gender ratio and class diversity than you do in the memberships of those old cons. And that's after the letters have been winnowed by male editors. But the internet is making that non-con-going segment a lot harder to ignore and a lot harder to exclude from the core, so even as the cons are getting more diverse, their lagging diversity is a lot more visible.
Also, of course, there's just a lot more people now, and therefore a lot more stuff being published so it's a lot harder to feel like you've got a handle on everything.