Why blog?

Alex Reid’s, Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web, discusses the various benefits, purposes, reasons, and results of the practice of blogging. As I read Reid’s text, I realized how underrated blogging is; I feel as though the practice of blogging should be done more and the result of blogging leads to a lot more than simply to have written personal opinions on certain topics.  In each and every one of our lives, anything and everything that happens or that you do shape factors in your life such as your personality, relationships, interests, and purpose. Reid mentions, “Of course, most students aren’t interested in becoming expert writers… In other words, while most students will not take writing courses to become professional writers, they might take those courses to serve other goals and interests that benefit from good writing skills”. Reid is correct to say that most students do not take these writing courses in hopes to become an expert or professional writer. He makes this point to show that because most students aren’t trying to become professional writers, writing for academic courses should include types of writing that will allow these students to learn the skills they need while cultivating their minds with topics of their interest. Reid says, “Unfortunately, often the trappings of school curriculum can interfere with our ability to connect writing to our own goals and interests”, meaning that what I just mentioned is how the school curriculum needs to be altered. Because anything and everything shapes your life, writing does too. Blogging, to be specific, helps serve as a solution to the issue Reid brings up about school writing curriculums. If blogging is able to serve as a solution to an issue that affects more than just a student’s writing skills, what else can doing the practice of blogging do? After reading Reid’s text, I started to wonder what the results of practicing blogging could lead to. How can blogging immensely affect and shape one’s life more than one would think? I tried to reflect on how blogging is so much more than simply a form of writing, sharing, and documenting. Reid’s Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web made me start thinking about how practicing blogging could explore purpose, lead to personality development, and improve human connection.

To figure out what purpose blogging serves in our lives, I first needed to know what a blog is and how blogging works. Reid defines, “One might think of blogs as public diaries or perhaps as amateur journalism or political, op-ed websites or maybe as celebrity gossip sites”. However, Reid continues to explain the history of blogging and blogging became what it is today. Blogging is a very popular form of information and writing: “The world of blogging has exploded this decade. Technorati.com, a site devoted to indexing blogs, has recorded 133 million blogs since 2002 representing an immense variety of interests and perspectives about what a blog can or should be” (Reid). Since blogs are so popular in our society, I wondered the reason for their popularity and what purpose blogging serves in our lives. I think blogging is as popular as it is because blogs are easier to read than scholarly writing, contain basic information you can learn from, may include opinions and the perspective of the writer, and can be on any topic. In addition, writing blogs can help us reflect on our own thoughts; blogging can help us actually learn more about a topic that we are interested in even more because, in order to blog about something, you have to know about it and be able to form your own opinions. Personally, I believe blogging helps our minds think and grow more because the purpose of blogging is to write out and share your knowledge and perspective; both the reader and the blogger benefits from the practice of blogging. 

Along with purpose, I believe blogging can lead to personality development. The action of blogging improves your thinking, helps generate more ideas and thoughts, and therefore can lead to personality development due to the thought that your brain is being exposed to more content while reading and writing. In order to write a blog post, research and thought are needed; this research can help one learn more on a topic one is interested in and the “thought” that is needed helps organize, expand, and explain one’s perspective. When you are thinking about what to write and how to write a blog post to effectively portray your thoughts to your readers, you are constantly stimulating your brain. I think that without being forced to organize your thoughts like you would when writing a blog post, you wouldn’t find the very valid points or the potential flaws of your opinions. You might ask how this relates to one’s development of personality; our personalities are created by the environments we live in, people we surround ourselves with, and experiences we encounter. By doing this type of thinking and doing, our personalities can become more open-minded, free, and fun because you are forced to really actively think about your stance, not just blindly follow it. While anything can alter our personalities, I think blogging is a good way to reach the full potential of one’s self. 

Some people might say that our modern-day technology has made people lose some human connection that was more concrete when this technology didn’t exist. However, blogs that are made accessible by our modern-day technology actually might improve human connection in some way. Reid writes, “the practice of blogging has become so vast, including people from around the world”. Blogs are very easily accessible that it is not difficult at all to be able to read someone’s thoughts on a certain subject, whether that is politics, food, sports, or music. Through blogs, people of our society can learn from others and view the perspective of someone other than their own. Recognizing the benefits of our modern-day technology is how we can lessen the negative effects. Blogs are one of the many benefits of our modern-day technology because as we read a writer’s blog, we might be inspired to write on our own or be inspired to do something. When one reads a blog post, that person is forming their own opinions on what the blogger is writing. The reader might even comment their response or share their own contrasting or similar opinions. This exchange of opinions, perspectives, and ideas is human connection; although it might not be direct human connection, it is definitely a form of it. Whatever is held within our minds, has no way of being let out unless we let it out and whatever is held within the minds of others, won’t be seen unless they make it seen. So blogging and reading blogs helps encourage these things stuck in our minds to come out. When your thoughts are expressed and heard, there is a better chance of others’ thoughts to be expressed and heard as well.

Blogging is something that can be both casual and complicated. There are many factors that make a blog successful. For example, Reid says, “You should experiment with font, font size, and spacing…The final major step is deciding how your readers will access and interact with your blog”. While it is important to take these elements of a blog into consideration, I think the most significant and valuable factor of blogging is the act of doing it. It doesn’t matter if you are the writer who is blogging or the reader who is reading blogs, it is important to interact and be exposed to blogs to get your dose of the opinions, facts, and perspectives of others. Thinking and reflecting on Reid’s, Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web has let me come to the realization that the act of blogging and reading blogs invites purpose, personality development, and human connection.

Work Cited

Reid, Alex. “Why Blog? Searching for Writing on the Web.” Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, vol. 2, Parlor Press, 2011, pp. 302–319.