Blog Reflection

       When we first got the assignment to start our own blogs in September, I wasn’t very excited. Keeping up a blog and updating it every week didn’t sound very fun or interesting. I thought it would be dull and tiring. As we got into the routine of doing blog posts and the year progressed, my opinion changed. By January, I enjoyed posting thing on my blog, updating it, and customizing it. I found it interesting to read other people’s post and comment on them. Despite this, my opinion had changed again by April. I quickly lost interest in my blog and stopped doing blog posts altogether. I missed writing on actual paper, which I found we didn’t do a lot of in class. Overall, by creating my blog, I leaned that writing online is very different from writing in real life.

          
        Part of why I, at first, enjoyed posting writing on my blog was because I found it somewhat liberating and I felt more free with my writing. A lot of times I found that I would be embarrassed to share my writing in real life, but it was a lot easier to share my writing online because there wasn’t an actual person in front of me, reading it. Blogs and online writing can be helpful in this way, because if you don’t want to share your writing in the flesh, you can put it online, anonymously even, so you still let other people read it. Although this is a perk of online writing and blogs, it is also a flaw. Authors of online work cannot actually see the reaction of people who read their writing, so many don’t think about the effects their writing could have on readers. Publishing anything online gives people the chance to say things that they might normally not say to someone’s face because they have the shield of a screen and keyboard between them. I think part of why I might have not been motivated to do blog posts anymore was that I missed the way writing on paper is so raw and real. When you show your paper writing to someone, you get their immediate and true reaction, not the reaction that was processed through a computer screen.  

Overall, by creating my blog I found that there are many differences between online writing and pencil and paper writing. Online writing has allowed me to be more open and daring with my writing, which at first I thought was great. However, online writing and blogs gives people the chance to lie or say hurtful things very easily, without facing any consequences. I will always come back to the realness and honestly of writing in a notebook.