After signing up for “Writing In & for Digital Environments” it made me realize the extent to which I am using social media as a part of my daily life. Although I comment on my friend’s photos or share links that I find interesting, I have never written something exclusively for public entertainment. When blogs are entertaining and evoke some sort of emotion, it is common for people to become drawn to them and want to follow them. This does not mean that blogs have to be funny, for many blogs that have thousands of followers are quite informative and serious. Pete Rorabaugh’s Organic Writing and Digital Media: Seeds and Organs article touches on important aspects to writing that are contusive to good blogs. He talks about the idea of “organic writing” and how writing is like a seed growing into a tree; a tree that grows to be big and tall with branches growing in several directions. Good blogs follow this same mechanism. They are founded off an idea, expanded and critiqued. I believe feedback from peers is important to creating a good blogs. When we post something to the Internet it automatically becomes communal because everyone can read it and critique it. Sean Morris’s article on the digital writing uprising emphasized this point. He says “Digital words have lives of their own. We may write them, birth them ourselves, but without any compunction or notice, they enact themselves in ways we can’t predict. And this is because digital writing is communal writing”. I think that this passage speaks volumes about blog writing, because the community reading the blogs helps push the author to write better and give ideas to the blogger to write about. One of my favorite blogs is “Humans of New York”. http://www.humansofnewyork.com
I love this blog because it makes a meaningful impact on not only our local community but also our worldwide community. It is a good blog because readers get the opportunity to read about people’s life stories from all over the world. HONY connects with its audience well because it evokes emotion from readers. It gives us an appreciation for the diversity and incredibleness of our world. In addition, it has embodied Rorabaugh’s and Morris’s ideas of “organic writing” and “communal writing”. HONY originally began as a catalog documenting New Yorkers and plotting their photos on a map, but then it turned into blog sharing photos of people with “snip its” of their life stories. It has also gone beyond a place for communal writing because it has touched so many lives and has started campaigns and drawn awareness towards numerous pressing issues. It is amazing how good blogs can come from any idea. As long as a blog brings some form of entertainment, whether it be funny or serious, can make a great blog. But what can make a blog great is if it evokes a form of emotion.