Read This One First

Professor, I believe you are taking a great risk.

A lot of the power that authority has comes from ritual and symbols. And in this class, you are most definitely the authority. By allowing us to post on our blogs in lieu of a more traditional 8 1/2" by 11", you run the risk of the degradation of many, many longstanding conventions in collegiate writing. For example, a student might dare to address you personally in his blog entry. The internet is the medium of the kids, their toys, their games, their blogs and all bad poetry that accompanies them. Allowing us to publish in such a soft, amorphous format invites informality and syntactical lapses. I can hear the walls of the institution crumbling already.

I had a blog for about two weeks back in high school. It contained very little about my day-to-day activities, and its subject matter tended to be too crude to mention here. I eventually closed the blog and fed it to a goat, once I realized that I had nothing to say to the world. I believe that the average high school blog is a simple cry for attention. I can see the seduction of seeing one's name in print, projecting one's life into the ocean of cyberspace like a spotlight into the clouds. It's a very obvious appeal.

Mature blogs serve a very different purpose. They are accessible, varied, colorful, subjective, and fun--all things that traditional news sources lack (not that blogs are simply a replacement for CNN). They are often very focused, allowed a weary web-surfer to find a large amount of information in a very specific topic of interest. I believe that its specificity is the strongest feature of any blog. Although, links to funny Youtube videos are a close second.

Cordially,
Arnold Kemp