A sense of BeLOnGing
Issue 14 - 04.13.06

BY AMBER SWALLOW
Cowley Journalism Department

Besides being a part-time student, Cowley freshman SheriLyne Isaac is a full-time nanny for her five younger siblings, whom she helps her mother homeschool – a job that she said lasts “all the time.” She also regularly attends church and takes a correspondence course from Grace University in Nebraska. However, regardless of her hectic schedule, she still makes time – about three hours a week – to blog.

A recent addition to many dictionaries, blog is short for “weblog.” Webster’s Dictionary defines a blog as “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.” According to online encyclopedia Wikipedia, although blogs have been present since Bryon Sutherland posted the first blog on April 19, 1995, blogs have only recently made a sudden surge in popularity. One particular blog site, Xanga, had only 100 online journals in 1997, a year after it was begun; by the end of 2005, there were over 50, 000,000 journals, according to Wikipedia.

In a recent online survey, 11 of the 18 “bloggers” who responded said they spent between one and four hours a week reading and posting blogs, five admitted to spending over four hours a week blogging, and only two said they spent less than an hour a week on these online journals.

Are blogs just a fad or are they a new means of primary communication?

“Blogging could be opening up a new avenue, a new channel basically, of how we are going to communicate with others in the future,” said Dan Muhwezi, a sociology instructor at Cowley College. “Face-to-face may be a communication of the past.”

The Internet is now providing countless blog hosts that are often typified by certain areas of interest including personal, cultural, topical, business, science, educational, and political. The most common, however, are personal blogs. Since 2001, these online diaries have increased in popularity, especially among high school and college students. Among the most popular of these online journals are MySpace, Xanga, Blogspot, LiveJournal, and Open Diary.

Isaac said that she uses her Xanga blog to keep in touch with over 20 friends near and far all at once. She posts pictures and writes about her life experiences, including “just normal stuff, spiritual stuff; the way God has been working in my life.”

Bloggers can easily post daily musings, events, stories, pictures, music, videos, news, web links, literature, and more. It gets the word out fast and makes the world a much smaller place.

However, according to Cowley sophomore Alli Regoli, it can also be quite addicting. “I think a lot of times it can be time-consuming,” said Regoli. “People can be obsessed.”
However, Isaac said that Xanga serves as a time-saver for her.

“If you are good at managing your time, then it [blogging] is a time-saver because everyone can know the same thing and you don’t have to call everyone and talk to them on the phone and tell the same story over and over,“ said Isaac. “So it’s good in that way. But it’s really easy to sit there and waste your time if you don’t have any self-control with it.”

Muhwezi said that such communication can be beneficial to save time and cut distance, allowing individuals to stay in touch with a much larger circle of people.

“In one way you can look at blogging as an advantage,” said Muhwezi, “because it gives an opportunity for the other person to also communicate with people that otherwise they wouldn’t communicate with.”

The advantages are obvious. The disadvantages can be more subtle. Muhwezi said that such links are “weak” compared to face-to-face communication. Muhwezi said that a “personal touch” is lost over the Internet, and with this network medium, people are no longer forced out into society.

“People were forced to extend their communication between individuals because it was limited,” said Muhwezi, “Then you were forced to learn the language because you had to communicate with your neighbors. Now, with this new method, I don’t have to communicate with my neighbors.”

Blogging has not only caused some to communicate too little with their community, but also to communicate too much with the outside world. Muhwezi said that such easy access and spread of information threatens safety and privacy because some bloggers are not mindful that everything posted online becomes global information that anyone with the Internet can access.

According to ABC News, the recent death of 14-year-old Judy Cajuste, who was found strangled and naked in a Newark, N. J. garbage bin, and the death of 15-year-old Kayla Reed, found in a canal not far from her home in Livermore, Calif., are just two cases of thousands of deaths in which stalkers were reported to use personal weblogs to track their victims.

The online survey also revealed that 15 of the 18 bloggers took only minor precautions when protecting their information. Many bloggers do not post their full names and locations, but is that enough?

The answer is no. A team or school name, the location of friends who visit and comment on a personal site, and pictures posted can often be just as informative as leaving a phone number and address.

In order to create a safer web environment, many personal weblog hosts feature safety tips about safety and privacy. Weblog users can also open private blog pages and post entries that can only be viewed by selected individuals. There are now even internet lawyers and entire web pages such as www.WiredSafety.org, www.blogsafety.com, and www.Internet-Safety.org which are dedicated to ensure personal safety on the Internet.