1/31/10

What is a blog? I guess that is the first question I need to ask myself and then look up the definition of a blog. Looking in my dictionaries at home, I did not find blog, so I turned to online dictionaries. Online dictionaries say that blogs are online journals or diaries that reflect the personality of the writer, or perhaps I should say blogger. The definition states that this information is made available to other people on the internet. Typical college students probably don’t have much trouble sharing their thoughts with others on the internet, but I do. When I was a kid, our telephones were party lines that were shared with maybe three or four neighbors. You knew the call was for you by the way it rang, maybe three short rings was for my family and one long, one short another family and so on. Long distance telephone calls were very expensive and you didn’t make many of them. Communicating with friends at college was done by writing letters and if it was really important perhaps a phone call. The phone for a whole dormitory floor would be in the hallway and whoever answered it would get the person receiving the call to the phone. I guess what I’m trying to say is that communication was not so open and readily available to the world and growing up in that time period makes me a much more private person than someone who grew up with the internet and knows no other way. It may not be a bad thing, I just have to get used to it; this way to communicate without social interaction. I suppose if somebody comments on my blog that would be considered social interaction. One thing that worries me though is that someday I might need to vent and use the blog to do it. That may not be a good thing because people may have already read it before I can retract it. I have been looking at other people’s blogs and seeing what can be done. Pictures, colors, backgrounds, bookshelves and I am sure I will find many more things that can be done to my blog. My daughter is in London, England in a study abroad program this semester. As a way of communicating with me, she has created a blog. She posts to it every few days and adds pictures and lets me (and the world) know what she has been doing. So I have her blog to look at as a model and I will have the classes blogs and maybe one day blogging will be second nature to me.