Let’s make one thing perfectly clear; I never wanted to be a blogger. A blogger. The sound of it makes me cringe.
Yet here I am blogging away a day after my English instructor announced that it would be required of me throughout the semester and that my grade point average would depend on it.
I know what you’re thinking. Everybody does it, why shouldn’t I want to join in on all the blogging fun?
It seems to me as if the whole world has a case of bad case of blog-arrhea, an ailment afflicting bloggers with symptoms including, but not limited to “excessive and frequent evacuation of blog postings, runny ones with little substance.”
It seems we live in an age where everyone online feels they must type up their two cents and share information with the entire world.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against freedom of expression and increased communication. I am however fearful that our democracy could be deteriorated in this brave new world of blogs and other user-generated content.
Blog-arrhea is everywhere and newspapers across the country are going under. People are starting to get more of their news and information off blogs and the Internet and less from journalistic publications written by trained professionals.
With blogs, there’s no guarantee that information is valid or not. No one is held responsible or accountable for the information they post and 99.9 percent of bloggers aren’t experienced reporters. With blogs, here-say and nonsense can be confused with valid information.
Sharing information is a privilege that should be earned and I don’t want to live in an age where I must tread through a pool of blog-arrhea trying to find some substance in the process.
I like to hold my information in my hands in the form of a newspaper written by professionals, not read it off a blog written by Joe six-pack.
But today, newspaper writers, who are trained to provide quality news and information and are backed by a newspaper, have become a dying breed, replaced by assholes with Internet access and an opinion.
So here I’ll be, blogging away for the next four months, praying my other English instructor won’t require me to "tweet."
Ooh. Perhaps I should make tweeting a requirement as well :) Just kidding.
ReplyDeleteThanks for humoring me for one semester, Evan by taking on this wretched genre of blogging. I believe that the blogs you are referring to have to deal with politics, news, sports, etc. But sometimes people use blogs as their journal space, to share feminist critiques of popular culture, to share ideas about technology or cooking, etc. There are many purposes for blogs and I hope you will find a way for making this blog assignment work for you.