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.