Big Brother Is Watching... And So Is Everyone Else

Blogs are personal, intricate, intimate beings.  The owner of particular blog is very keen to nurture his or her brainchild, to ensure that it grows and receives proper attention.  Ever since its parent was born in 1994 with the first online diaries, the concept and the physicality of the blog has grown rapidly to admit literal millions of participants.  The participants in question are able to sire dozens of blogs if they so desire, and each one is unique in its own way.

So what exactly makes up a blog?

Jill Rettberg's book "Blogging" settles on defining a blog as a medium.  It holds varied forms of media; much like how YouTube has videos, comments, suggestions, the blog has posts, comments, and different archives and genres to choose from.  However, is medium the right word for it? Just because the concept of the blog is able to hold different forms of media (pictures, text, videos, etc.), does it necessarily mean that the blog is in itself an overarching being- an end-all be-all like the television or the Pope? Or is it just another cog in the intricate steampunk robot of the modern internet age, making it simply a genre with various sub-genres under its command? 

Another problem facing the blog-o-sphere is the following question: what exactly is personal when it comes to blogs?  Individual blogging sites may have terms and conditions, but such conditions only relate to what one can and cannot post.  Nothing is said about the privacy of the individuals post.  In fact, Miller & Shepherd's Blogging as a Social Action... piece gives a number of examples on how personal material has reached the eyes of audiences that were never meant to be aware.  A student's personal diary (in blog form) was investigated by the FBI; a woman's vented frustrations of her upbringing and career experience was seen by the people she wrote about.  Nothing seems to be safe, so why do people still post intimate details about their lives?

Lastly, the question of the night comes down to what is the future of the blog?  Already we have seen an exponential growth in the number of blogs since inception of the word in 1997, so much so that sites such as Technorati have had to scale down their indexing of blogs from all in existence to the top 100.  Rettberg explains how blogging has now come hand in hand with journalism in a pseudo-symbiotic relationship.  Miller & Shepherd reveal that through studying the kairos associated with the blog, the time is now.  Will blogs continue to expand due to the individual's desire to be heard?  I think so.



-Melissa DeHart


Sources:

Miller, Carolyn R., and Dawn Shephard. "Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture 
     of Weblogs: Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog." Into the Blogosphere:        Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs: Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of         the Weblog. University of Minnesota, 25 Sept. 2004. Web. 14 Sept. 2014.

Rettberg, Jill Walker. Blogging. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Print.