Blogs in Society

October 29, 2008’s reading for com 430z was titled “The Blogs in Society” by Aaron Barlow, which was published in 2008, in the second chapter of the book Blogging America.

Barlow mostly speaks about the arguments that are associated with blogs. The first argument he brings up is that people are saying blogging is basically useless and is not even related to the real world. People that support this idea state that because of the lack of identity, and responsibility associated with a known identity, people can post whatever they want to on the web. They can do this without any of the punishments that they would run into in the real world. Also, without this requirement for identity people can change their own and claim to be someone else. This can lead to much confusion and allows for rumors and false statements to be passed around as true. The last part of this argument is that people can interfere with relevant conversation by adding irrelevant and even malicious comments, which in turn has the power to render the blog channel useless. People get tired of all of the nonsense that a specific channel has acquired and ceases to use it anymore.

The other side of the argument states the complete opposite. It states that this blogging community is a real world, and maybe even more real. It is not censored by “professionals” and may contain more pure information and thoughts than we can see in our world today. For our world to grow and become less dependent on mainstream media, this bogging community may be a necessary mechanism. This kind of public gathering outside of the governments and mainstream media is what has in the past changed our world, and changed in for the better. Sifting through clutter may not be so bad when compared to that.

I believe the authors main message in talking about these two prospective is that there need to be some type of happy medium, which is usually the case in most types of arguments. He then goes on to give suggestion that maybe we need to look at this problem from a different prospective. It seems most people still look at the internet from a “literary” standpoint and maybe we should try to get a better understanding of “neteracy”. I believe his point is that older forms of print are much different than the forms we have and will continue to see on the web, and this is point I feel we have to agree on.