Word Processing

I have kept several blogs before, off and on.  I’ve gone through two since starting college, both of which are, to my knowledge, still out there, hiding, though I pray that most of my acquaintances don’t find them at this point.  Anyway, not really the point right now.  Looking back, I feel like this blog is - has been - like those blogs.  I’ve made some use of it, I feel like my ideas have been expressed very occasionally, and overall I can be happy with some of it and wished some of it would vanish from the face of the internet.

I have been drawn to blogging before in hopes of reaching a wider audience with my thoughts.  A part of me definitely likes having the possibility that I’ve got loads of readers.  My previous blogs ended up mostly just being visited by my friends, in a few cases with disastrous results.  I have, therefore, become paranoid about policing what I actually put on such things, and feel like I often censor myself more than I’d like in blogs particularly.

Overall, however, I like having some of my writing accessible to readers who seek it out, and I definitely like the idea of having class blogs.  With my personal blogs, occasionally someone I didn’t know would stray onto the blog and post a comment, and that was always oddly gratifying.  The fact that a class blog means that I have a class worth of readers (if only now that we have to review the class blogs) appeals to me greatly.  I wish it had happened earlier, just as I wish, as noted in my post on the class blog, that I had been a better reader over the course of the last semester.

That said, this blog succumbed to my usual problem with blogging much more quickly than any personal blog I have ever kept: laziness.  Yep, there you have it.  I get to the point that I just don’t post because it takes up my precious time.  There were definitely comments I wanted to add to class discussion that I thought about putting up here, and then just never did.  I still have a few posts’ worth of material rolling around in my brain, but I’m still not gonna put it up, because I’d rather go play video games.

The other problem with me and blogging is that I often look at it as kind of a dumping ground.  I have no problem with electronic media for writing, I just guess I have a low opinion of blogs in general because of their massive proliferation.  I often don’t put a great deal of effort into blogging; any thoughts I have are generally just spilled out into the editor, stream-of-consciousness style, and then get posted.  I just kind of let the posts go and roam where they please.

Nonetheless, I like what this part of the class could lead to someday.  I like the idea of extending writing beyond the class and beyond the papers.  I would like to see more interaction between the blogs, certainly, and perhaps a bit more focus on them.  I think there is a lot of potential to create something great, but it isn’t going to happen spontaneously.

I don’t feel very attached to my blog personally, perhaps because, looking back at the posts, very few of them really had much of me in them.  Part of that comes from the fact that they are mostly reading responses, and I wasn’t especially passionate about most of the topics on which we had to do reading responses.  Most of those posts just feel, to me, like me answering a question, by rote, and that’s just not something in which I can feel invested.  It takes a little bit of the personal factor (and the personality) away from the blog.  Perhaps weekly posts would be a better way to go.  Some could certainly be reading responses if something struck the writer’s fancy.  I know that probably would’ve suited me better, and likely just would’ve produced a blog which I can be proud of for more than just the completion of another assignment.

At this point I feel like I’m droning on, trying to extend this final post.  I just don’t have much to say about this blog, and, like with many of the posts on it, I am mostly just responding to the prompt as I go.  I am now ready to shove this blog out of the nest and let it learn how to fly (or not) all on its own.  I am destined for other places.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.