Okay, so I’m trying to create a new blog and I’ve been attempting all the Blogger URLs that I might like to use. But, of course, they’re all taken.
Even worse, these people either a) haven’t posted anything since five + years ago, b) only have one post that was made five + years ago, or c) simply made a “test” page.
I’m not really “enraged” that people set up these accounts with the hope of keeping up with them, but come on. One post? A test page?
Please, if you’re experimenting with blogging, or just making a pointless test page, choose a pointless URL. Pick something no one else would ever want, like “ilovehitler.blogspot.com,” or just “testpage.blogspot.com.” (I don’t know if those are taken, but I don’t think anyone would want to pick them anyway – unless someone actually did make a test page and called it “testpage,” in which case that’s okay.) Besides, you can always change it later.
Or, if after some test posts you decide blogging isn’t for you, change the URL to something ridiculous.
It’s not a huge deal that every URL I want to use is already in “use,” but it’s annoying enough that, ironically enough, I had to blog about it.
Whenever I tell people I’m in MIT (Media, Information, and Technoculture), they always ask, “What do you do? Watch movies in class?” And when I say, “yeah, sometimes,” they give me this disappoint head shake, as if that’s nothing. As if what we’re doing doesn’t matter, or is so easy and fun that it’s completely pointless.
This is not the case. At all.
As Marshall McLuhan said (and I think this quote might actually be the MIT catchphrase), “The medium is the message.” The reason we watch movies, TV shows, news broadcasts, and YouTube in class, is because everyone does it. Because media affects us and plays such a major part of everyday life, us MIT-ers are just trying to find out the why and how.
In the YouTube video, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube,” there was one line in particular that caught my attention: “When media change, human relationships change.” So why shouldn’t it be studied?
Without TV, the internet, and cell phones, we probably wouldn’t be alone as much. We might not even feel the need to be as self-expressive, to set ourselves aside form the anonymous mass. Being separated/fragmented individuals, it’s obvious we want a solid community. It just so happens that YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere is it.
People were offended and hurt when lonelygirl15, for example, was revealed to be fake, resulting in a YouTube “authenticity crisis.” You wouldn’t want your friends or family to lie to you, so why is it any different when your online friends (people you trust and talk to and listen to) aren’t who you thought they were? It brings the loneliness back, and people don’t like that feeling. No one likes to be played like that.
Sometimes...no, every time I YouTube I find the rudest comments (and some I can’t even read because apparently spelling and grammar are a thing of the past). I almost want to tell them to shut the F up if they’re going to be so negative, but then it really wouldn’t be YouTube.
The anonymity of the “invisible audience” is what makes YouTube a place for and of authenticity; if everyone knew it was really YOU speaking, you might not say what you really think. You might not even bother to say anything.
Newspapers, the telephone, the radio, the television, and the Internet have all changed the way we work, interact, think, and basically live. But there’s one scenario that can change everything, and I mean, everything: a power outage.
Imagine you couldn’t watch TV, check your email, drive, buy groceries, check your email again, text your BFF, cook. Our world as we know it would fall in on itself; without our technology and our media, we’d be completely lost and probably very lonely.
Then again, it might mean we’d start connecting more physically, say, having a conversation with someone while in the same room. Not that we don’t do that now, but now we have a choice not to.
See? There's more to MIT than just “watching movies.”
Have you ever heard the expression, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”?
Yeah, I guess that saying has a ring of truth to it, and as most of those wise old sayings go, they can be applied to just about everything. For example, just replace “old dog” with “journalism,” and “can’t” with “can,” and what do you get? BLOGS!
I’ve been aware of these things called “blogs” for a while, read them occasionally, and wrote for them never. Now my first one is just one among millions – 70 million according to The State of the Live Web – so it’s hard to imagine that anyone would find mine in the vast sea of civic journalism and actually read it. Then again, Perez Hilton did pretty well for himself, as did Arianna Huffington.
But with a massive jump of 40 million new blogs in less than a year, I have to wonder why so many people are hopping on the blog-wagon. Being one of those people, here are some of my own reasons:
Need for personal expression
Desire to know, understand, and connect with others
Distrust of the mainstream media
Love of writing
Had to find out what all the fuss is about
Another motive for the blog craze could be out of a need to understand and deal with real-life issues. Techorati suggests this through its graph of Daily Posting Volume, which shows spikes in the amount of postings during such events as the 2004 US election, Hurricane Katrina, the Israel/Hezbollah conflict, and the time now-V.P. Biden called Obama “clean.” (Isn’t it strange that most of those are US-based?)
But if you think about it, the growing popularity of blogs can also help explain the increase in tagging and the trend towards folksonomy.
Folk (common people) and taxonomy (categorization system) collide in this modern and fun-to-say word. And just as categorizing everything and everyone – from gender, to religion, to political leanings, to food groups, to movie genres – helps us organize and better understand our world, so do blogs. Blogging and tagging allow us to search, link, share, debate, connect, and learn.
Their popularity has also given the mainstream news media some unexpected competition, even making it feel threatened enough that they had to incorporate our medium into theirs.
If you ask me – although, I guess if you’re reading this you want to know what I think – this brand of news, ie., blogging, is the most reliable news we have (for the moment anyway).
Bloggers don’t hide under journalism’s guise of “objectivity;” they tell it like it is and as it ought to be. But right or wrong, left or right, bloggers’/our ideas are flowing, leaving marks on a world we live, learn, and write about.
New tricks indeed!
One last relevant, timeless (yet slightly updated) saying:
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