Over the course of this decade, bloggers evolved from their emo, woah is me rhetoric during the dot-com days to the current tweeing or posting on Facebook information as soon as it happens, right from your mobile device in this social media world. Although most of us on here are now in the frenzy that is the latter, we should all take a step back and make sure we don’t get too much information overload and misinterpret the basic notion of these basic principles:
What’s fact
What’s fiction
What’s just opinion
The past couple of days, I’ve seen posts shared from bloggers that from a quick glance, looks like a full, journalistic article, however upon a slightly closer look, it is what it really is… a blog post. A good blogger would support things like quotes and statements with their actual sources, just like we all had to provide a bibliography for ever paper we wrote while in school. There are some bloggers out that that just spout out their own personal agenda, with the hopes of their fellow trolls and unsuspecting commenters would flood the post with a huge thread.
During my last semester as an undergrad, I took a media GE course which the professor went into a discussion about the blogging sensation. Back in 2005, blogging was making the turn from the personal, yet public diary type idiom to what most of us consider blogging is today… writing about current events and putting a personal spin on it. The biggest concern my professor had then was that bloggers would end up being the primary source of news acquisition for people. I shared this concern with him then and I do so more today.
The major difference between a journalist and a blogger is that the latter usually doesn’t have the skill to convey information that is unbiased and merely factual to their audience. What I’m seeing today is that people are essentially believing everything they’re coming across on the internet and stating it as fact.
The past few days, I have pointed out a couple of blogs that seemed pretty bogus, as I could not find any supporting articles that made those posts accurate. And to those I pointed such things out to, I really don’t mean to sound like an ass about it… it’s just I’m trying to avoid the continuation of the mis-information that can virally spread on the Internet.
If you’ve managed to make it this far in reading, the final thing I ‘d like to convey is that we should all ensure that what we read on the Internet is actual fact before sharing it with each other. A simple Google search can do absolute wonders and you will be doing this social media world a good justice by doing so.
And to end this, a post about blogging I did back in 2005: http://rapp81.livejournal.com/172645.html
Unfortuantely, the CCTimes link is dead from the retro-post.
But at least the OT I’ve been pulling in these couple of weeks will essentially pay off my iPhone replacement! lol
5:37am