What is a Blog and How did my Perception of a Blog change over the Semester??
Now after one semester of intensive blogging in the context of our English class, I have to say my experience about blogs is less limited and I actually feel I have widened my horizon with respect to the virtual world.
My opinion on blogging and the reasons why people blog, however, have not considerably changed. I still consider a blog a communication platform, either with a personal or private agenda or with a more specific agenda, such as the political blogs you find everywhere on the net. On these blogs people share and discuss matters of relevance, express emotions and opinions as well as they are a method of self-display. There are also various ways of self-display – you can upload pictures and songs, and sometimes these sites even let you create slideshows and video clips. Apart from the more trivial blogs I have mentioned prior to my advanced knowledge of blogging, such as myspace.com and facebook.com, I have found more sophisticated blogging forums. While I was doing research for my argument paper, for instance, I came across numerous blogs where homeschooling families shared their thoughts, ideas and concerns with other homeschooling parents. I thought that was pretty interesting. Although these blogs provided me with valuable insight, their information was not very valuable to me and my paper but it helped me to approach the issue from different angles.
Additionally, I still believe a blog can even be a great tool to stay in touch with friends and family, granted they are knowledgeable to use a blog. I really liked what one of my friends did. She created a travel blog, which she is using to continuously update her friends and family about her latest travel adventures, the various trips she is taking and the internships she took abroad. Since I liked her idea so much, I am really thinking about creating a blog for myself where I put information about me and what I am doing while I am over here in order to keep them posted and to stay in touch with my friends and family. Therefore, this blog could be beneficial for both, me and my folks.
One major issue about blogging, I believe is critically important and should not be overseen – the problem of hate-speech and hate-crime. Since anyone can publish and express anything online, people subscribing to certain blogs MUST be very careful about their choice of blog. Hate-speech and discriminatory language is a very wide spread issue among blogging and bloggers themselves and needs to be carefully monitored since hate-speech can manipulate certain people and can motivate all sorts of criminal acts and felonies.
Summarizing my thoughts on web blogs, I can honestly say that I know a lot more about them and that this class made me more aware of them. Our class blog, although sometimes I really did NOT feel like blogging was quite beneficial to the communication in and for the class but it will never and should never replace the real exchange of thoughts and information, i.e. the actual communication.
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