This is an interesting response to the question of if online communities are destroying the physical community. It seems that as we form tighter bonds to people in the online world, we lose the connections we had in the physical world and as a consequence are starting to crave human affection. Read the full article here.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
To Blog or not to Blog
Today I read an interesting article in the latest copy of Frankie magazine regarding blogs. The article discusses the nature of blogs, their authors and their relevance in our growing technological age. I found the article to be significant to our current KCB201 assignment, and I started wondering where blogging fits into my online life and my scholarly pursuits. I wanted to raise the issue of not only relevance, but importance of blogs within our growing online society.
Coming into this subject with a fair knowledge of media studies, Internet usage and of Axel’s quirky assessment items, I wasn’t surprised or overwhelmed with the thought of continuous blogging as part of the assessment criteria. However, when we compare this to a traditional university assessment (essay format, word-processed, etc) we can see a shift in both technological advancement and communication methods. As Henry Jenkins (2008) points out in his own blog, media studies is a discipline that has been quick to embrace new media platforms that incorporate research and scholarly pursuits. He suggests in this particular article titled ‘Why Academics Should Blog’ that Blogs are an important medium in which expression and academic credibility combine with prompt availability and widely circulated content.
According to Cameron Marlow (2004, 1), blogging is a new form of social interaction on the web that allows users to connect over conversations of interest. In the beginning, only a handful of individuals adopted these blogs into their regular online social communication, however popularity grew and now the prevalence of blogs in the online sphere (112 million, as of December 2007 - according to Wikipedia) is phenomenal. Looking at this popularity, perhaps blogging is the way of the future for some university subjects. Is blogging the new online communication frontier?
Upon talking to a few people, it came to me that blogs can either go one of two ways. I know some people who consider blogs to be their source of entertainment and information, whether it be a gossip blog like Perez Hilton or a factual blog like Henry Jenkins. To these people, blogs are considered to be a valuable and useful tool for finding information. I also know the people who despise writing and reading blogs, who consider them to be a means for people with nothing significant to say, to publicly voice their opinion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but as a society how important is a rambling article about the choice between vegemite and jam in the morning? The quality of blogs found on the Internet strongly varies between blog to blog and author to author.
The article that appeared in Frankie was very interesting about the importance of these blogs. Written by Justin Heazlewood (in case he comes across this in his morning self-google) it discusses the standard of blogs circulating on the Internet. He makes the point that punctuation and spelling has gone out the window, and the content also leaves much to be desired. He then raised a really interesting point about the ethics of writing about others in your blogs. Should we change names to hide identities? Or technically do we own our experiences and memories, and therefore have the right to blog about whatever we want? This is important point to keep in mind in our blogs, as we are being encouraged to interact and incorporate others’ opinions into our articles. Where do the ethics lie in relation to this? For my fellow KCB201ers and myself, this shouldn’t be too hard knowing what is appropriate and what isn’t. However, within an informal blogging sphere the question of appropriateness is not only highly relevant, but something that should be considered by all before hitting the ‘Post’ button.
I wonder what the general opinion is on blogs, and in particular their relevance to virtual cultures and media technologies. What rules govern the blogging realm? Do we take creative ownership over what we post, and therefore have the right to say what we feel? Or are there certain rules and ethics we should abide by to respect our fellow internet users?
References
Heazlewood, J. 2008. Dear Blog… Frankie. Page 88, issue May/June.
Marlow, Cameron. Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. 1-9 http://web.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.pdf. (accessed 11th May 2008)
Coming into this subject with a fair knowledge of media studies, Internet usage and of Axel’s quirky assessment items, I wasn’t surprised or overwhelmed with the thought of continuous blogging as part of the assessment criteria. However, when we compare this to a traditional university assessment (essay format, word-processed, etc) we can see a shift in both technological advancement and communication methods. As Henry Jenkins (2008) points out in his own blog, media studies is a discipline that has been quick to embrace new media platforms that incorporate research and scholarly pursuits. He suggests in this particular article titled ‘Why Academics Should Blog’ that Blogs are an important medium in which expression and academic credibility combine with prompt availability and widely circulated content.
According to Cameron Marlow (2004, 1), blogging is a new form of social interaction on the web that allows users to connect over conversations of interest. In the beginning, only a handful of individuals adopted these blogs into their regular online social communication, however popularity grew and now the prevalence of blogs in the online sphere (112 million, as of December 2007 - according to Wikipedia) is phenomenal. Looking at this popularity, perhaps blogging is the way of the future for some university subjects. Is blogging the new online communication frontier?
Upon talking to a few people, it came to me that blogs can either go one of two ways. I know some people who consider blogs to be their source of entertainment and information, whether it be a gossip blog like Perez Hilton or a factual blog like Henry Jenkins. To these people, blogs are considered to be a valuable and useful tool for finding information. I also know the people who despise writing and reading blogs, who consider them to be a means for people with nothing significant to say, to publicly voice their opinion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but as a society how important is a rambling article about the choice between vegemite and jam in the morning? The quality of blogs found on the Internet strongly varies between blog to blog and author to author.
The article that appeared in Frankie was very interesting about the importance of these blogs. Written by Justin Heazlewood (in case he comes across this in his morning self-google) it discusses the standard of blogs circulating on the Internet. He makes the point that punctuation and spelling has gone out the window, and the content also leaves much to be desired. He then raised a really interesting point about the ethics of writing about others in your blogs. Should we change names to hide identities? Or technically do we own our experiences and memories, and therefore have the right to blog about whatever we want? This is important point to keep in mind in our blogs, as we are being encouraged to interact and incorporate others’ opinions into our articles. Where do the ethics lie in relation to this? For my fellow KCB201ers and myself, this shouldn’t be too hard knowing what is appropriate and what isn’t. However, within an informal blogging sphere the question of appropriateness is not only highly relevant, but something that should be considered by all before hitting the ‘Post’ button.
I wonder what the general opinion is on blogs, and in particular their relevance to virtual cultures and media technologies. What rules govern the blogging realm? Do we take creative ownership over what we post, and therefore have the right to say what we feel? Or are there certain rules and ethics we should abide by to respect our fellow internet users?
References
Heazlewood, J. 2008. Dear Blog… Frankie. Page 88, issue May/June.
Marlow, Cameron. Audience, structure and authority in the weblog community. 1-9 http://web.media.mit.edu/~cameron/cv/pubs/04-01.pdf. (accessed 11th May 2008)
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