Blogs Revisited

Looking back at my first blog post, at the beginning of the quarter, I mostly thought that bloggers were self-absorbed people with too much time on their hands who spend all day writing about their trip to the mall or lame things like that. While there still are lots of blogs like that, this quarter I learned about the varieties of different ways that people can express themselves through blogs. I didn’t know that blogs were being used for journalism, education, and political means – I had always thought that they were a personal thing. The more I learned about blogs, the more interesting they became to me and I saw that there were actually a lot of blogs out there that would be worthwhile to keep up with. Another thing I learned was that it’s hard to define what a blog really is – whether it’s an online journal, a form of journalism, or academic writing. The articles I read that attempted to define blogs always failed miserably, so I’m going to spare myself the embarrassment. All I can say on that is that a blog is whatever the person who is blogging wants it to be.

After learning all of this about the merits and diversity of blogs, I can also say I’m not really sure if they’re for me. I mean, maybe I will read blogs, but I don’t think I’m meant to be a blog writer. I wasn’t very good at all about keeping my blog updated – for me it was kind of like the journals in elementary school that I would start and then forget about two weeks later. In retrospect, it would have been really cool to have kept those journals as a kid, but I just never was up to maintaining them.

I think that blogs can be a useful tool in academia. The Educause article on educational blogging that I read for an earlier blog assignment contained some doubts about whether blogs in response to an assignment were really blogs or just fell flat because they weren’t real expressions by the authors. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Yes, we’re probably not going to be as perfectly candid in a blog as we are with our friends in person, but that just means that we’re considering our audience. Our audience for the blogs in the class consists not only of Christine, but also of pretty much everyone in the world who has internet access and who might stumble across our pages. I am definitely not going to be as candid in a blog for the world to see as I am with friends. I also think that the blogs are useful for class because it lets everyone see what everyone else is writing and what they are interested in. Otherwise, it’s not much different from having everyone write a reading response and turning it in to the teacher. The difference with blogs is that we can all see each others’ responses (and respond to them if we so choose). While it may not always happen that everyone has time to read other peoples’ blogs, at least there is that option.

In terms of a collaborative blog, I think that might be more trouble than it is worth. On the one hand, it might be cool to have all of our thoughts compiled in one place. On the other hand, what is nice about blogging is that it is usually a space just for your thoughts. Having to work with other people to negotiate a shared blog might be frustrating, and it might end up seeming more like a chat board with different posters and less like a personal blog.

Overall, I think having the blog for this class was a good idea and was a good way to have reading response, but I might have made it more compulsory to read other people’s blogs (maybe make three responses required), so at least you have to see what they’re all up to.

Persuasive Gaming

I never really play shoot-em-up violent video games, so it was hard for me to really picture what the creators of Velvet Strike were trying to do based on the salon.com article “The Velvet Strike Underground.” From what I can get, it seems like players can download anti-war “sprays” and spray them on the wall while playing Counter Strike. At first I didn’t get what the point of this would be – clearly if a person has gone to the lengths of downloading and spraying these anti-war messages, then they are already anti-war, so who cares if their version of the game has graffiti everywhere. Then I remembered how my brother would always keep me off the computer because he was playing online with other people (and so he couldn’t ditch out on them, he said) – I realized that it was a protest because the other gamers online would see their sprays. Duh! Sometimes even I, a supposedly tech savvy young person, forget that people do everything online now, even kill people (virtually, that is).

That confusion over with, I don’t know if I think Velvet Strike is a super effective idea. I don’t think graffiti is ever really effective in convincing people to change their minds on something – it usually just seems like a form of expression for the person who is actually spraying. But maybe this isn’t meant to make people change their minds – maybe it’s just meant to force them to be aware. Having protesters spraying peace slogans (and hopscotch boards) on the walls forces gamers to be aware at least that they are viewing political content in games.

One gamer is quoted in the article as saying: “I don't know why you feel the need to tie my beloved video game into this, but it's pretty low. It makes me sad to think that there may not be one thing in this world that someone hasn't already tied their political bullshit to.” What he doesn’t realize is that he is already seeing “political bullshit” when he goes around murdering Arabs in video games like Counter-Strike. General effects of violent video games aside, he is already being made to see Arabs as targets and “the bad guys.” So, in that sense, whether or not the sprays will change anyone’s mind, at least it is making them aware. They are being fed politics through the act of just playing shoot em up games with Arabs as targets, whether they are resentful of being made aware of it or not.

Wikis

From the Guardian article “Common Knowledge”:

“What makes the Wikipedia so compelling - and this article so hard to finish - is the way everything is so massively linked. You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds.”

This reminded me of the article we read at the very beginning of the quarter complaining about how the internet allows for such narrow searches that we never explore beyond the specifics of what exactly we are looking for. I remember in class we talked about how wrong he was because no matter what you are looking for on the web, there are always links to distract you. Each link might lead you only to something slightly different from the original page, but over time you can get to topics so far removed from the original topic that you wonder how you ended up there.

After browsing around the wikipedia.com site (for way longer than I could really afford, with all of the other work I’m supposed to be doing), one of the coolest/most addicting things I found was that everything was linked. As the Guardian article talks about, apparently it is really easy to link words as you are writing (making WikiWords). If there’s anything that we don’t need to worry about at all, it is that internet is going to keep us from exploring off-topic subjects. I started browsing by looking at the definition for differential equations and I ended up at the page for a manga published in Japan called Love Hina.

On the one hand, it was kind of neat just to surf around and find things that I didn’t even know I would have looked for. On the other hand, I didn’t read a single article all the way through in the entire time that I was surfing because I always clicked on a WikiWord before I was done with the page I was looking at. Maybe that’s just me and my short attention span, but somehow I think other people have had similar experiences. So it seems like Wikipedias can be an amazing tool for information but also for procrastination and jumbled information. Not that the information on Wikipedia itself is jumbled, it just became jumbled in my brain as each page I started to (but didn’t finish) reading bled into the next.

Blogging and Online Communication

This blog is commenting on Stephen Downs’ article, “Educational Blogging.” First of all, for someone who claims to understand an online form of communication like blogging, the article was way too frikkin’ long to be on just one page. If I weren’t reading it for a class, I would not have read it all the way through. Just looking at the scroll bar on the right hand side of the page was discouraging – at one point I noticed I had been reading for 10 minutes and wasn’t even a quarter of the way down. If I were him, I would have broken it up into several shorter pages, with better differentiation between the different aspects of blogs he was addressing rather than just including all of his huge amounts of information in one page and no format.

Anyway, aside from the formatting of the page, there were some interesting points in the article. One thing I noticed was his assertion that “the definitions of blogging offered by bloggers, as opposed to those offered by external commentators, follow this theme. Blogging is something defined by format and process, not by content.” Throughout this part of the article, he seems to be saying that no matter whether you are an 15 year-old writing about your crushes at school or a 45 year-old writing about the war in Iraq, the essence of a blog is commentary. That commentary can be on your friends, someone else’s blog, political events, or just your own life.

Later, he seems to confine this statement to say that blogging is only about response to reading what you’re interested in:

"Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting. If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a boring life. It is because the student has not yet stretched out to the larger world, has not yet learned to meaningfully engage in a community."

This really narrows his earlier definition. Now he is saying blogging is about reading something and responding, creating an engaged community of bloggers. I wouldn’t necessarily agree. What about people who are just keeping online journals? Those are blogs, too, even if they are responding to nothing but the author’s own life. You don’t have to read blogs to write blogs. You don’t have to read anything to write blogs. I think that blogs can be just as much about writing and expressing as they can be about commenting. Most of these articles that we’ve read which have attempted to define blogs just seem to narrow down the possibilities – blogs can be any number of things and it seems like the more people try to put their finger on the “essence” of blogging, the more they sound like they’re spewing a lot of bs.