Blogging. How the word sounds so familiar yet the experience of it is so unfamiliar I find somewhat amusing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had experience with other forms of blogging before. But WordPress blogging and actually writing about my life experiences is something new to me. So it came with such surprise to be told that I needed to keep this blog for the next couple of years throughout the duration of my course. It’s moments like these that I realized that it’s true when they say that, ‘If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before.’ Honestly, I am very new to this whole blogging thing but I’m willing to give it a chance and become somewhat good at it since I’m keen to finally study something that I like: Media.

In our first Media One workshop (skipping all the introductory exercises), we discussed blogs and its uses based on one of our weekly readings, ‘Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning’ by Miles Adrian. In a brief nature, blogging is a writing process which combines a mixture of formal and informal language to communicate ideas to a public audience. It’s most outstanding difference to a journal is that blogs are made for readers as much as it is for writers. Hence writers, or bloggers I should say, should not assume that readers always know what they’re talking about.

A thought I pondered in relation to the previous statement is that readers should also try to keep a very open mind. As blogs are made with the assumption that it has readers, blogs are also made to allow the author an opportunity to express their own views on topics they wish to discuss. And with this, it is the reader’s choice if they wish to be persuaded by the author’s perspective, but aim to avoid creating arguments against the author if their views are conflicting. So a rule of thumb for life in general: if you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Just read it and move on.