Almost five years ago, I began my first blog. It wasn't anything like this one, however; it was about a middle schooler's interest in Pokemon. After a while, I realized that updating it required too much effort and stopped blogging. In high school, I was reintroduced to blogging, but it was of a different form: academic and structured.
Although my experience with blogging is limited, I am getting a feel for the usefulness of blogging, especially in an English class. Blogging has been a useful medium through which I was able to reconcile my creativity with the structure that English class often requires. It allowed me to express my thoughts and the way my mind works in a manner that is both personal and professional.
In that sense, I realized that blogging is a blend of both the private and public sphere. Although I control the content of my blog posts, the content is directed toward a public audience, who can contribute their own opinions through comments. I noticed that this combination of the private and public realms tends to foster the kind of critical thinking we do in English.
Interestingly enough, although we Academy students are blogging in a public space, we are still having some of our most personal interactions. Blogging has been a useful public forum where we can express our well-formulated opinions that we have thought about for some time. But although our blogs are public, they are not read by many others outside of our classroom. In essence, our blogs are simply extensions of our English class to a slightly more public sphere.
Reflecting on my past posts, I have noticed that most of them were inspired by a moment of interest in a topic I felt I wanted to explore. For example, I had always been curious as to "what we (in America) are lacking." Given the technology-focused nature of this blog, I felt that I should discuss how technology has altered our lives, and thus my first non-introductory blog post was "The Opportunity Cost of Technology."
Similarly, as I enjoy playing games, when I stumbled upon a blog post on Kotaku, a video game blog, discussing gaming for charity, I began to consider the impact of games on society. "How could gaming be helpful?" I asked myself. "What do I feel I gain by playing games? Is it stress-relieving? What can I compare this to?" Of course, I did my research as well. But the critical thinking that was fostered by brooding over these questions over an extended period, which is often unavailable in the short time frame of our English class, was beneficial. In a way, each blog post was like a thought experiment.
Speaking of thought experiments, The Happiness Project has been an inspiration for my blog. Gretchen Rubin focuses on a topic that everyone has everyone has considered at least once: how can I be happy? Beyond that, though, I am also impressed by the name Rubin has made for herself through the blogging community; she is not only an influential blogger, but also a writer and a speaker. Finally, she updates almost daily and manages to keep her posts personal, relevant, and interesting. To put it simply, she exhibits the aspects of a good blogger, such as catering both to herself and her intended audience.
Although Academy blogs may not be comparable to The Happiness Project, it's definitely interesting to read them and get a feel for what my classmates are thinking. For example, sometimes Ethan and I are blogging about the same topic, because both of our blogs focus on humans and their interactions with technology. Because our themes are similar, I think that furthers our contributions to each other's blogs when we comment our own ideas and why we agree or disagree with the original post.
Most importantly, I learned that blogging is a lot more work than it at first seems. The number of things a blogger has to juggle has really changed my opinion of bloggers in general, especially those that update daily or even weekly. Between contributing their own opinions, reading others' blogs, finding relevant links, and making the blog post discussion-inducing, bloggers spend a lot of work doing what they love. In the future, I hope to make my blog more professional, while at the same time, infusing my posts with more voice.
Word Count: 730
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