Macroassignment 2

Libby Coley
Professor Broderick
Computer Mediated Communications
December 2, 2009

Hopelessly Devoted to Blogging

Over the past four months, I have discovered the greatness that is blogging. Immensely popular today, more and more people are getting them for all different kinds of reasons. Some crazy college professors are even implementing them in their classes—gasp! So, blogs are popular—what’s all the fuss about? In this paper, I will examine my experiences with my own personal Tumblr account, my friends’ blogs, my WordPress blog for this class, and political blogs like those of Change.org, showing how the ever-popular blog is a very useful technology indeed that creates community, broadens perspectives, and engages the masses in all sorts of ways.
Of all the communication technologies out there, I chose to write about blogging because of my recent first experiences with it and because I feel that it has made a profound effect on how I see and use the Internet. About a month ago, I opened up an account with Tumblr, one of the many blog engines in cyberspace. I had to choose among other popular blogs like Blogger, WordPress, Blogspot, Livejournal, and Technorati, each of which offers essentially the same features: the ability to post text, videos, photos, links, and mp3s. The main differences between each of these blogs is their layout, the number of design options they offer, and specific abilities. I chose Tumblr because I like its design best and because of the number of options it gives users for their blog layout. Through my Tumblr blog, I really feel like I have gotten to know the Internet and all that it has to offer. I have seen new things that have amazed and inspired me, made me laugh, and made me think, such as inventions, art projects, musical artists, and videos. Blogging is a great tool for exploring the Internet because it allows people to easily find all kinds of information.
That being said, blogs are used for a wide variety of reasons. For example, I use my Tumblr blog to post things I find on the web that I want to be able to access in the future—videos, songs, photos, and articles. I find blogging things that I like to be much more space-efficient than bookmarking all the different pages on my web browser. Posting these items on my blog also allows me to share them with the wider world, and in particular, my friends who visit it. This would not be possible through bookmarking and can become cumbersome via emails. A lot of other blogs I have seen use their blogs for similar reasons. For example, many bloggers post photographs that they like, some of which are entirely devoted to just (see papertissue on Tumblr). Others use blogs as journals, for keeping in touch with family, and for cataloging different categories of things. In the past couple of months as a blogger, I’ve come across blogs on everything from funny Amazon reviews (amazingamazonreviews) to photos of Santa objects in stores during the holiday season (crappysantas) to all kinds of stuff about beer (beeriety) to photos of parents back in the day (myparentswereawesome). All of these blogs serve the purpose of collecting information in various forms of a particular category of things and making that information more accessible to the general public. For example, if I want to find some new Christmas songs, I can go to the letsbeglad Tumblr, which features songs by both contemporary and classic indie musical artists and groups. It’s awesome! Blogs are a great cataloging and bookmarking tool.
Another valuable use of this communications technology is for business or art networking. One of my friends here at Clark is a Studio Art major with a concentration in photography. She designed and started up a blog last year to showcase her work and provide those interested in it with her resume, including all of her gallery showings. Thus, her blog goes beyond the function of sharing her work with others and exposes her work to the wider professional photography community. In this way, professionals can use blogs to gain increased exposure, opportunities, and business.
In addition, groups, not only individuals, use blogs. One interesting example is a community blog called Studio Mothers: Life and Art. My aunt has been a part of this blog for a couple of years now. It serves as a forum for mothers who are also artists in some realm (be it photography, writing, etc.) where they can discuss issues related to balancing motherhood with their work. The Welcome box on the right hand side of the page reads, “Thanks for stopping by! In this creative community, you can share your creative intentions, receive support in making those goals happen, and discuss all things related to creativity. While we’re primarily focused on the issues that creative mothers encounter, all are welcome.” Each blogger also has her own personal blog, which are listed in another box on the page, and posts can be made straight on the Studio Art blog or “crossposted” from the women’s personal blogs. Upon reading through a few posts, I was surprised to see just how much of a community it truly is for these women. Most posts, longer ones especially, have around 10-20 comments on them (one had 42!), most of which are back and forth comments that follow the format of a conversation. Thus, this and other community blogs allow people to create connections to others all over the world, giving and receiving support like any other “real life” relationship. In the Studio Mothers blog, women write about their triumphs and their struggles in their work and in their family life, asking for advice and sharing their experiences. Although I am not part of a community blog per say, the following tool on Tumblr and most other blogs allows you to see and share your interests with others who share them, thus forming community as well.
An interesting use of this community aspect of blogging can also be seen in our class blog experiment. By far, my favorite aspect of our class blogs was being able to read what my other classmates experienced and thought about our microassignments and communicate with them about their thoughts via commenting. Our class blogs had several significant advantages. First, they allowed us to have one-on-one discussions with our classmates through comments. This would be a serious advantage for students who are shy and don’t like to speak up in class. Further, some students just get their thoughts out better in writing. The class blog is also an advantage in situations where students are unable to get a word in during class because of the sheer number of students participating in discussion. For example, students can make comments on their classmates’ blogs about, say, something a classmate said in class discussion and further the discussion there. Thus, their second advantage: students can comment on each other’s blogs and create and ongoing, meaningful discussions. This was by far the aspect that I got the most out of. I loved commenting on my classmates’ blogs and going back and forth with them in discussion. They would bring up ideas I hadn’t thought of and I for them, causing us to learn a lot more than if, say, we had just written separate individual papers for our professor.
The third advantage of these class blogs is that they can be a place where students jot down thoughts and musings that come up randomly, or as they read for class, or whatever else related to the course. For example, if a student realizes something while she’s folding laundry or finds something on the internet that sparks something in her mind related to class, she can blog about it. That way, her mind is active. Class blogs provide a place where students can work through that spark, instead of just letting it go because they are busy doing something else and then (potentially) forgetting it. In these ways, blogging is very useful in classroom settings, expanding the classroom beyond the scope of a student’s assignments and class lectures and discussions.
Beyond their great capacity for creating community, blogs are also a very effective way of raising awareness and activism. One great website that aims to do just this is Change.org. This “social entrepreneurship venture” (www.change.org) raises awareness about issues through the use of 16 different blogs focused around distinct causes from Animal Welfare and Animal Rights to Global Health to Gay Rights to Immigration. Each causes’ blog has a few different people in charge of it who post to it, then anyone who is a member of Change.org can comment on those posts. As a member myself, I have read many extensive comments on the posts that are often a conversation going on between several members that others join in on from time to time. In this way, they are expanding the discussion, further educating other members (and themselves) and raising even more awareness that hopefully inspires members to take action on the particular cause (as is the website’s mission). In this type of blog community, people can learn so much and take part in vital sociopolitical activity.
Another blog that centers around raising awareness and inspiring action is the Emily X blog of Planned Parenthood. Every fall from September through November, this blog charts the experiences of Planned Paren thood employees and activists in their encounters with abortion protestors. As it says on the blog, “Emily X serves as a reminder to the pro-choice community of the harassment and intimidation practiced by opponents of women’s health” (www.iamemilyx.blogspot.com). Both Change.org’s blogs and Emily X allow people to become aware and get involved in causes regardless of their physical location and create community among readers who can collaborate to make change. In this way, blogs serve as the foreground to important social change and political action every day.
The success of this pervasive technology cannot be measured in financial terms. However, it can be measured according to several others, depending on its application. For my personal application as a bookmarking and sharing device, I would say that it is very successful because it saves me a lot of time and is a great way to explore the Internet. My friend who uses her blog as a portfolio of her professional photographic works would measure her blog’s success by how much buzz it generates about her, and by its success as a networking device. Community blogs can also be judged as successful by their ability to bring people together and create active discussions that involve problem-solving. Lastly, the success of blogs that center around increasing awareness and encouraging action can be measured by the amount of action and the success of those actions that were sparked by the blog’s efforts and tools. So, yes, we can all probably name a few people we know who have blogs, but their applications go way beyond just writing about one’s day. And yes, they do provide hours and hours of entertainment (something I’m surely guilty of…), but they are much more than just that. Blogs are incredible community-creating, action-inspiring, networking tools that have captured people and organizations all over the world. As can be inferred solely from the popularity of this technology, it is clear that we are all hopelessly devoted to blogging.