Imanging the Blogisphere: POSTS

Imagining the Blogosphere: Posts

In the article Imagining the Blogosphere, Graham Lampa of Hamline University weaves the ideas and terms of writers, researchers, and scholars and the experiences of the real world to define, as he calls it, the ‘blogosphere’. Lampa emphasizes that while the ‘blogosphere’ may feel like an online community, that community is only imagined. He claims that online news blogging has vast advantages over print blogging; online news blogging has room for personal experiences and ideas rather than that which has been written by a paid individual and then heavily edited. After reading this article, I have not only gained insight of blogging and the blogosphere, but also insight on myself. For starters, I never realized the amount of those that do not update their blogs, and those to the extent to never return to their very own blogs. After reading about the research and surveys mentioned in the article, I could not stop thinking about how it accurately related to me. The article mentioned that the average abandoned blog only lasts about four months. I instantly thought about this blog. I only created one purely for this class. In two months’, time, I would not come back to use this again. There will be no need because this course will be finished (and hopefully I passed). Like many of you in this class, we will abandon our blogs and continue our lives without worrying about turning in our notes and reflections by three in the afternoon on a Friday. Though we were required to build a blog, I feel a bit sad to let it go soon. Yes, my excitement about this blog has dramatically died down since writing the notes and reflections each week, but the idea of blogging still sounds intriguing to me. Honestly, if I had a blog (not for school), I would completely stop utilizing it after four months tops. The main benefit is the independent news blog as opposed to formal, print news sources is that the amount of opinions, accounts, and resources of blogging are, according to Lampa, unlimited. Still, while blogging may feel a global process, Lampa restates that any semblance of community within the ‘blogosphere’ is, indeed, imagined; only the most popular blogs are ever commonly seen, and blogs can only be reached by those with easily accessible internet. It is important to have real people giving us insight about a would event.