Blogs Revisited

Throughout the quarter as we have read about blogs, discussed blogs, kept blogs, and researched blogs, I have continued to update my personal blog. My view on blogs has changed over the course of this quarter but not entirely because of eRhetorics. I discovered that people from my dorm had unearthed my xanga and were reading it on a daily basis. This altered my whole audience and thus, my writing. I found myself being careful with words and descriptions as to not offend any potential readers. As a result of this, I revealed less and less of my more private thoughts. Frankly, I didn’t care if strangers read the idiocies that came out of my head, but my friends knowing disturbed me a little bit.

To me, blogs will always be a journal. Even news blogs or thematic blogs such as this one are ideas and occurrences that happen to me in real life retold in virtual text form. What separates a journalism blog from a news article? It is simply a personal viewpoint updated daily on things that are happening to the author. This is a journal to me. Perhaps it has a little more substance than me talking about my day, but at its heart is a journal. I think blogs could have a very firm place in academia. Just because it is not formal writing doesn’t mean it should be discounted as a medium. What a blog lacks in polish it more than makes up for in honesty and spontaneity.

I think the class keeping a collective blog would be great. As long as entries were entered anonymously, I believe open forums about eSubjects as well as the class itself could be a great way to share ideas and express opinions that we might not discuss in class. I’d prefer this to the normal forum because it is a lot more fluid and changing. The strings and responses of normal forums just seem counteractive to natural conversation to me.

Overall, I’ve thought about the impact of blogs as well as the purpose. Even after viewing all these varieties, my blog remains a way for me to describe a thought or vent about something that’s annoying me. Perhaps as I experiment with my audience further, I will need to experiment with my style as well.