You know you’ve finally arrived on the scene, when your life story gets posted on Wikipedia.
Stop what you’re doing, go to a search engine and type in “blog.” Hundreds of thousands of results pop up. Everyone seems to be “blogging,” the word “blog” is actually considered a verb (I blog, you blogged, they are blogging), and even Spell check on Microsoft Windows seems to acknowledge it as acceptable dialect, since no red underlined markings appear to declare it as misspelled or out of the ordinary.
So, how did this cultural phenomenon come to be? James C. Foust’s “Online Journalism: Principles and Practices of News for the Web” and Wikipedia recount its early beginnings and provide some insight regarding its exciting future.
The “blog,” short for web log, is described as an electronic journal entry, diary or post, providing commentary on news, events and a variety of subjects. Blogs promote convergence, as they combine different types of media, such as video, audio and even music files to strengthen its message.
There are all sorts of blogs, too. News, corporate, personal, question (you can type in a question and others post answers and advice). The list is endless. The rise of Home Improvement and Makeover television programs may have contributed to the increasing popularity of "house blogs,” or blogs allowing homeowners to document and share information regarding their home improvement or renovation process.
According to Wikipedia, before blogging became popular, we had digital communities (Usenet), commercial online services (Genie) and Bulletin Board Systems, which created an outlet to post messages. The modern blog was born from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College who began blogging in 1994, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, while Dave Winer’s “Scripting News” is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs.
The collective community of all blogs is known as the “blogosphere,” which may sound ominous to some-kind of like the web’s own version of the black hole, filled with infinite data and information. Though it may be easy to lose your way in this black hole, blogging is quickly becoming more mainstream, as many journalists today use blogs to increase the reach of their messages/reports while others consider them therapeutic.
Though blogging has many advantages in modern day culture, it simultaneously presents concerns regarding accuracy and truth. According to Chapter 4 of Foust’s “Online Journalism: Principles and Practices of News for the Web,” “blogging offers the potential to create entirely new forms of discourse, making room for a level of participatory community that has not been possible before." Blogging also creates a “marketplace of ideas, unfiltered by media corporations or editors.” However, according to Foust, “the downside to the fact that anyone can blog is, of course, that anyone can blog.” Therefore it becomes inherently important to define our realities and establish out journalistic independence.
Links of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
http://olj.hh-pub.com
http://www.hgtv.com/hgtv/pac_ctnt_988/text/0,,HGTV_22056_60311,00.html
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