blogging @ reflection

this week, i had a chance to reflect my blogging/posting on social media journey and how these “seamless” activities took me far away from the common pathway.

at the moment, i very much found myself similar to Case 3: Evolutionary process of life online (Dennen, 2014) with the whinny and consistently positive spirit. the only different is that my interest is instructional design and the community that i’m serving is still very new to become an expert community.

however, it was never that easy.

going back to the first day, i grew up since the end of Myspace and the start of Yahoo 360! Blog, Blogging – to me, is something that only “authorized” author can do. my job as a reader is to distribute the information to others people and grow the network of the author or can also be perceived as the subject expert, similarly to the right part of the visualization below.

but now with Web 2.0, everything changes, community start to emerge with trust, reciprocity and ongoing relationships (Ellonen, Kosonen & Henttonen, 2007; Kling & Courtright, 2003). i still remember the first days when logging into Facebook and still in love with the long-form yet rarely have the courage to write anything.

the only pieces of writing that i had is the Facebook tagging challenge, where as there was one person who initiated the challenge and he tagged two other persons in that challenge, that two persons needed to complete the challenge and then tagged another two more. the challenge usually had a set of questions on a certain topics, e.g.: what’s your favorite books, movies, people in the class. the list can be up to 100 questions and i once-finish-them-a-set of 100 questions.

but as time goes by, i tend to skip though lengthy long-form tag challenge and at the same time, Facebook also change its approach to focusing on Facebook Notes to Facebook post, which endorse shorter content, faster to initiate a conversation, in other words, contribution.

as the memories go buys, I’m still seeing myself calling it “blogging” with long-form content, and other types of blogging to be their own specific words based on the platform, e.g.: post for Facebook, tweet in Twitter, pin in Pinterest, somehow, blogging is still a very meticulous, prestigious, all of the fancy words that i can think of. at the same time, social media is where i worked, social media used to be my sanctuary.

but now thinking about this, a sanctuary is definitely something that divide between a “god” and a “normal people”, that has certain standard that I have to meet. i definitely felt a pressure like a classmate of mine:

but learning as bottom of my heart is conversational and accessible to everyone.
but what if i’m no longer blogging because of time or interest?

i found the notion that new blogs regularly established and old ones retired (Dennen, 2014) keeps me alive as a blogger and that’s probably the next thing that i drive the change is not to blog for myself only but blog with and blog for the community, like what i am (struggling but still) attempting to do with #eme6414.

Reference:

Dennen, V. P. (2014). Becoming a blogger: Trajectories, norms, and activities in a community of practice. Computers in Human Behavior, 36, 350-358. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.03.028