Reflections on Blogging

Because I haven’t been a particularly active blogger this past semester, I believe that I still have not completely developed a unique personality for myself on my blog, “What’s Memory?” While the website’s character draws from my lens, memory, I feel that my writing doesn’t yet have a voice that any reader would immediately attribute to me. When I first started blogging for my sophomore English class, my writing was very quasi-academic because the rules for posting and interacting with the audience were very lax. As a result, I was surprised to learn this semester that becoming a proficient blogger actually had many prerequisites not limited to having thought clarity and very good writing skills, such as doing outside research. For example, while my blog does have posts that are cohesive in themselves, “What’s Memory” seems disjointed overall, despite my supposedly connecting theme of “memory.” One post would discuss the concept of memory in photojournalism while the next would illustrate how my past perceptions of Africa were debunked in class.

Besides those personal concerns, I’ve had an incredible experience writing my blog so far because it has made my learning especially in the Academy much more dynamic. While a majority of my posts were based off of ideas in English that piqued my interest, I also had to analyze such concepts via a lens of memory, which always made blogging challenging but rewarding. As a result of my efforts, I came up with and elaborated on some of my best ideas in several posts, most notably “Dealing with Brainwashing.”

In this post, I analyzed the eerie similarity between the Tiananmen Square and the Rabaa al-Adawiya Massacres as well as each respective government’s response to each event. At first, the only main connection I could find was that both the Chinese and Egyptian governments were using brainwashing and censorship tactics to blind their populations from learning about the massacres. However, I started to think in terms of solutions and wondered whether the social-media methods that Chinese activists are using to educate the Chinese population about Tiananmen Square can also be used in Egypt in order to make sure that the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya does not disappear. Furthermore, I realized that since issues of brainwashing and censorship are so prevalent today, especially in Iran and North Korea, I wrote “how the Egyptians will work to successfully preserve the memory of Rabaa al-Adawiya may provide some clues about how people should combat, in this day and age, imposed efforts to intentionally revise history.”

After I looked back at my posts, I realized that most of the ideas that I developed in them were not actually pre-planned. I noticed that a majority of them arose only after I wrote a particular paragraph or sentence. Although I wish that my ideas and concepts weren’t spontaneous, I realized that especially in blogging, I’ve found it challenging to develop a comprehensive outline describing how I would structure and write a post. Perhaps this can be attributed to my misconception that the posts on professional blogs are all just rough drafts. Indeed, for the first couple of posts, I wrote directly in the word spaces rather than completing rough drafts as well as multiple revisions in separate word documents. Now, I do write and rewrite my posts in word documents, but I still come up with my best ideas spontaneously. Maybe this is just the way my brain naturally works in writing, but I hope to work on controlling my ideas before I start blogging.

            While I should reflect only on what I’ve learned from blogging, I think this piece would be incomplete without acknowledging my experience reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. On numerous occasions, I looked at my classmates’ blogs for some inspiration in composing my own posts. The insights that many elaborated from combining their unique lenses and topics discussed in Academy classes were often so incredible that I had to comment. For example, Matthew Bondy wrote an interesting post on how aid-giving can be paradoxically self-serving rather than entirely altruistic. This resulted in a comment session about providing aid vertically or horizontally and whether intentions behind providing aid really matter.

            Despite my hardships adapting to the numerous rules of blogging this semester, my experiences writing online have been very rewarding, challenging me to juxtapose ideas discussed in class and concepts in memory. With the intellectual exercises that came with writing online, blogging has definitely been a very integral part of English. 

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