The word blog refers to both a medium and a practice, as explained in this week’s reading1.
From a technical standpoint, a blog is a collection of entries (called “posts”) presented on a website in reverse chronological order, with each post having a title, timestamp, author, permanent link and often complex taxonomies like categories and tags. Blogging as a medium builds on hypertext technology (the basis for the world wide web) to allow authors and publishers to link to, and be linked from, other blogs and websites, thus creating a series of interconnected, networked sites all engaged in the practice of blogging. Hypertext also enables authors to embed rich media like images and video into their posts.
Blogging as a practice evolved in the late-1990s era of the web, as an outgrowth of personal websites where authors would create diaries, autobiographies and interesting links for their friends to enjoy and comment on. Blogging is an ongoing, cumulative process which requires a blogger to periodically and regularly create new posts for their blog, as well as curate a theme, voice and style that makes their blog unique.
Within the blogging medium one can identify a number of unique genres: personal diaries, filter blogs (curated lists of links), political blog, etc. Politics is a common topic for blogging, as are culture, art and technology. The most common form of blog involves an author taking information from elsewhere on the web, quoting from it (or embedding media from it), and adding a short amount of text with context and their own opinion. Crucially, their post will include a link to whatever article or media is being discussed in the post, allowing readers to follow up and read the original source for themselves should they wish, creating a mesh of links and content that criss-crosses the web.
Content creation is central to the idea of using blogs in media education, according to Adrian Miles2. Blogs, and the practice of blogging, allow students to document their practice, reflect on their experiences, comment on each others’ work and collaborate on projects together. The public nature of blogs forces the student to think about how they present their work to an audience, and requires that they synthesise their learning in such a way that it can be “explained” to that audience (real or imagined).
Having used a blog in the context of media education for a year already, I have found that it has helped me immensely in consolidating my learning. It has also broken down barriers of ego and control: since a blog is more about the creative process and less about the finished product, I feel less self-conscious about posting unfinished or experimental work that might not be perfect. I’m looking forward to using this blog for the rest of my degree and building on what I’ve already created.