Emily's Public Writing Paper

Within the last ten years there’s been a huge influx of blog action. But that’s not the point. From teens sharing angsty poems with online communities that understand them, to political pundits pounding away at keyboards launching their voices into cyberspace, to journalists breaking stories on the printed page of computer screens, the blogosphere has risen from the seed of the Internet like a wild-growing vine, tangling its way into homes, politics, and pop culture with the voracity of something that won’t be satisfied until it’s entwined itself around our very fingertips, wrapping them around the keys of our keyboards.

One particularly interesting area of focus is the use of blogs by teens and young adults. Sites such as xanga.com and myspace.com provide a distinctly social purpose, and are generally used in at least one of two different ways. First, blogs link a user to a pre-existing group of friends. Seconds, blogs connect users to other, similarly minded people they don’t know. Basically, someone with a single blog (or several) is able to find and cultivate an online circle of friends that he/she may or may not already know.

Through providing an additional social outlet for users, blogs fulfill several needs within a social purpose. Perhaps the biggest attraction to blogs for this younger user set is the ability to create a personal identity Whether a blog is an extension of someone’s personality in real life, or not—a display of who the user believes they really are—blogs allow users to define and mold themselves into how they want to be seen. This happens in a number of ways, through online groups, lists of favorite movies, and the users’ posts of personal details.

As blogging develops as a genre, it continues to grow in different ways. Using Facebook.com as an example, the blog/yearbook hybrid, blogs aren’t just for writing anymore. In addition, blogs aren’t just for writers anymore. Facebook users in particular have run into new kinds of problems as the site struggles to exist as both a personal blog, yet operate within a semi-academic frame. Students posting pictures of underage drinking have caused legal problems, and employers may even try to gain access to a future employee’s blogs to discover how he/she behaves informally.

While blogging continues to provide new texts to study, new frames to investigate, and new issues of identity to examine, the threat of following along is the risk of getting lost in the culture. The challenge is to watch objectively and critically as the genre develops while still participating in the growing world of the blogosphere.