New Age Communication – Blogging by 300003383

(Screen name: Pineapple4me–Blog discussed May 26 2009 “A sad day in California”

New forms of communication are born daily, blogging is one of them. Blogging allows people to discreetly express themselves about sensitive subjects without the fear of being judged by society. This paper will discuss blogging as a new form of communication.

Blogging is a fresh form of communication and discussion over the World Wide Web. The internet is full of blog’s ranging in topics from sports, cooking, sex, music, fashion, politics and just about every other topic imaginable and unimaginable. If you were to ask someone five years ago if they blogged, you might have been looked at weird or asked “what’s a blog?” Basically an online journal with subscribing members, blogs allow for complete anonymity, allowing members to speak freely and without inhibitions. Blogs allow people to express feelings and opinions that they might refrain from doing so in face to face interactions. Recently I participated in a blog for a sociology class and I observed this exact phenomenon in a particular post about gay marriage. In this paper I will discuss the blog in question and the discrete nature of blogs.

The post titled “A sad day for California” by BLUERAE is about a very controversial subject, gay marriage. Recently the California courts upheld proposition 8 making it against the law for a gay couple to get married in California. The poster was expressing her sadness about the ruling and how she hopes that one day “ALL HUMANS WILL BE TREATED EQUALLY”. Several replies were made in response to the post, some on grievance and some showing sympathy. The striking but interesting reply was made by a poster named “Red/Rose”. It was this poster opinion that gay marriage is wrong and that marriage should only be between a man and a woman, she also went on to say that gay people “impose their life styles on others” and that “this is not a human rights issue”. These blunt and inconsiderate comments hurt some of the posters on the blog, one poster named “cherry86” even said she began crying after readying the comment. Without a doubt, the comments made were hurtful, inconsiderate and rude.

Would “red/rose” have said this in person? Would she have hesitated makeing those exact comments if the discussion was in a public forum? This is the beauty of blogging; it allows users to truly express what they feel without having to worry about the implications of their words. Blogging allows people to sit behind a desk or laptop with a faux identification, you can say anything you want, positive or negative and know that no one will know who you are. “Red/Rose” might have been a co-worker of “BLURRAE” and they would have never known it. Blogging allows for real opinions, no hesitations or fear. People say what they mean, even if it’s going to hurt people.

It’s funny the things people will say when they have no fear of being publicly ridiculed or shamed. What a person says in a blog might be the exact opposite of what they might say in public. We live in a world where it’s correct to be politically correct. We don’t want to offend people because what if we lose our job, or become labeled a homophobe. Blogging is a new form of communicating that allows for complete discretion of identity, we sit behind handles like “Champ132” or “rain” and say what we want without fear of reactions to absurd comments. It is this exact feature that in my opinion, will allow blogging to be popular form of communication for years to come. There will always be controversy on blogs accompanied by far right or far left opinions.