Friday, June 1, 2007

Essay #3 Blogging is Taken Out of Context

What is the purpose of blogging? That is a question that has many different and complex answers. It seems that many people blog because it could be their job, a hobby, or just another way to “hear” themselves talk. Blogging in most ways is a good thing but it’s sometimes taken out of context until that little percent of people take it over the edge, which can lead to a lot of drama.

For some reason there are those people who take blogging for granted and use their own sites to attack others. Blogging wasn’t meant for people to attack each other over the internet. It was meant for people to use it as a journal or just a place to spill their thoughts. Then there are those people who use their own sites as a place to criticize and attack other people. For example, there was a girl in my high school English class who had a blog on Xanga.com, and had a nasty post about our teacher. Well, our teacher somehow found out about the post and made a comment about it during class so the girl knew that she had found it. The girl ended up deleting the post that night so no one else could make a big deal out of it.

People seem to get caught up in the aspect of “professional” blogging. Because there are certain people have been blogging so long they tend to criticize other people rather than helping them. For example, when a group of students posted on a blog site called, Defective Yeti, (http://www.defectiveyeti.com/archives/002026.html#comments) for a class assignment, many people who have been blogging for awhile took the opportunity to criticize how the students left their comments on the post. These people may have meant to help by pointing out a few mistakes in a couple comments that were left, but it was in the way they seemed to attack the students in their comments when everything started to get out of control. People started to attack the students and even the teacher about how poor the grammar was and how they could not believe that a college English class would focus on blogging. It then turned into this huge debate on weather or not English was the students’ second language and how they had no right to comment on a blog when they were new to the blogging world. All of this because of a couple grammar mistakes that someone felt was offensive and had to point out for all to see. This again is exactly my point, there are people who take blogging to the extreme and it can lead to is drama.

Misusing the comment section on blogs is the biggest way, in my opinion, to use blogging negatively. I have a friend who posts blogs on Xanga.com and after one of her posts another girl left a comment about how she is immature and is disappointed in her for some reason or another. (http://www.xanga.com/GrEeN_DaZzLe/ 562976141/item.html) After that there was a lot of drama between the two girls and most of it was over what was said in a blog and again it was a communicated by leaving comments on each other’s blog page.

One of the biggest examples of people taking a blog out of text and turning it into something it’s not is when a student was wrongly accused of being behind the Virginia Tech shooting. This student was wrongly accused all because of his blog (http://wanusmaximus.livejournal.com/ April 16th blog) and the content he had on it was about how he was a gun collected and he also had pictures of all the guns too. The student had to post that he was not the gunman because there were so many people harassing him and since he was accused everyone thought it was him. This is the worst case of people misusing blogging because this guy was accused of this horrific crime and was innocent the whole time. He was only accused because people took his post’s and pictures as saying that he was the killer and blamed it on him.

People should be more responsible about what they comment and think of other people, you can’t just claim you know something about someone just because you read a blog post of theirs. There is so much more to a person other than the babbling posts that they leave on the internet for others to see.

1 comment:

Rebecca said...

I think you are entirely right. Enjoyed reading your blog...keep at it:)