Attempted Paradigm Shift: Week One

As a 65 year old man trapped in a 25 year old man’s body, I have a somewhat innate distaste for social media, reality television, twitter, blogs, the Kardashian’s, much of pop culture and what I (and a few of my geriatric friends) think of as the brain-melting culture of the 21^st century. I enrolled in this class of digital communication technologies with the hope of arriving at a point where I can appreciate social media and blogs if not just tolerate them. Otherwise, I sense that my hoped for career in communication and journalism will end as quickly as I receive an undergraduate degree in communication. I was open about my feelings toward blogs on the first day of class, and Kathy Gill was quick to educate me about my ignorance.

Our first assigned class reading, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog”, by Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd was the perfect article to destroy a lot of my misconceptions about weblogs. The article analyzes the incredibly quick acceptance of the genre of blogging in our culture and how blogging has found such a large group of both readers and bloggers. The increasing prevalence of blogs and their relevance has been discussed in other communication courses I’ve taken, and I’ve read plenty of articles about the topic as well. The authors of this article explained the context of the rise of blogging from the 1990s until now.

Having grown up during that time period, I recognize the rise in society’s desire to see into the private lives of celebrities and the rise of many normal people to celebrity status. The authors relate our voyeuristic desires to experience life events by witnessing other people’s lives as one reason that blogs were embraced so quickly by society. Even though I am usually annoyed by reality television or social media, I participate in voyeuristic practices just like most of society. Who hasn’t used Facebook to look up old class mates, friends, or exes to see what they’re up to? A friend of mine has been Facebook stalking a girl for over a year because she envies her life even though she has never met her or seen her in person. Facebook has given us security options to prevent this sort of thing.

The authors attempt to define the blog as a genre in one section of their paper. They analyze it as a form of journal or diary, but don’t feel like it is exactly that. They quote the website Whatis.com as saying that the blog has been called “the log of our times.” This references the ship logs used to keep a record of the events that occur while at sea. Thinking of a blog in this context changed my perspective of blogging in general. What I previously deemed as a self-obsessed outlet for the narcissistic, I can now see as something more than that. There are many reasons why someone may write a blog (my past belief potentially included), but blogs will likely be a log of our times from vast perspectives. Kathy Gill pointed out in class that the creation of software that makes blog writing easy can be likened to the invention of the printing press. The printing press led to a huge increase in printed material. Some of that material may be as unimportant as the junk mail I receive almost daily or as important as a life changing piece of literature. There go a few of my misconceptions about digital communication; probably a lot more to go.