Nam_Sophia_Spr09_FinalPaper

Sophia Nam May 16, 2009 AH 495, Zucman Blogs: The Digital Recorder “Anyone else feel this when you drink any caffeinated drink?” My first question out to the empty cyber world. There are millions of users of the internet yet what we type on blogs, websites, and forums might not be read by anyone. Compared to a written diary or journal, blogs are easier to access and one can upload entries from any computer possible. It does not simply have to be text but with videos, sound, music, and images. The pages of the blog can be filled with color. Of course one needs access to a computer and not everyone has a computer. In America, libraries and other institutions make computer access easier for most. But does the blog really relate to the //real// self? Does it really accurately record what one experienced? In this paper, the analysis of my own blogging experience will be analyzed by my blog’s content, my own perception, and my communication style. This blogging experience was for a grade. The first few entries were very obvious that it was by not mentioning emotion compared to the latter entries. In the beginning, my entries were about what happened that day or week, and maybe a few emotional comments of how I felt. It was described in a research that “adolescent bloggers project off-line themes to their blogs, suggesting that their on-line and off-line contexts are psychologically connected” (Subrahmanyam, 2009). It is not just adolescent bloggers that connect the on-line and off-line contexts because this statement applies to me, an emerging young adult. My blog contained a lot of descriptions because I knew the reader would not understand all my abbreviations and experiences. I was supposed to receive feedback from my professor’s class but that did not happen. There were a lot of complications between the meeting times for his independent study students. I hoped for a more intimate time with the professor so I can talk about my needs for this project. It felt a bit impersonal when other students were reading through my problems for my blog. I knew that his intent was to get more diverse ideas but I just wanted his personal opinion. Ironically, surrounding this blog there was even greater problems and events in my life. Even though I had a much lighter unit schedule, I fell into a depression, experienced a heavier load to do activities for my church, and I did not have enough money to buy food for the rest of the semester. This caused an even greater difficulty in trying to meet on Thursdays in the evening for the meeting of the independent study students. I did not mention any of this in my blog because it felt too personal for an audience and I did not want to blame church for my academic struggles. Through this experience of blogging, I had to create a new blog dedicated to this project, a Blogger account. I never used the website for personal blogging, so I explored the website to take advantage of every feature. I have blog accounts for LiveJournal, Xanga, and a Blogger account shared with my sister and best friend for art so I knew the gist of how blogging should be and which features should be shared between other blogging websites. I created a completely new account name to portray who I am: “Not-Korean.” I used this username because I do not speak Korean, yet I am ethnically Korean. When people ask me “what are you?” it makes me feel like an outsider, as though I am not an American. In this blog, I did not describe my username because I tried to display it through my entries. Through videos and my voice, I hoped it presented why I chose the username. Concerning the features of the website, it would have been nice if Blogger had groups. For example, LiveJournal has communities and Xanga has its groups so bloggers can join groups of interest. This would create a better sense of community and a greater insight for me from other bloggers so I could see what they thought of my day. I then discovered the blog watching feature for Blogger and I loved it. I could follow blogs other than just Blogger accounts. This made me enjoy my blogging experience much more than before I started Blogger. The tagging option for journal entries was also a new feature for me. It made it easier to categorize my entries into “text,” “illustration,” “video,” and “audio” categories. Overall, the experience of Blogger was pleasant with the features that other blog communities did not have. To begin the analysis of the illustrations in the blog, the image of the girl cutting her forehead was not just for the “Meetup with Dad” entry. It was a personification of all the emotion from my meeting with my father to the family problems that were happening. Most of my family’s problems concern financial need and the status of our parents. Because they are divorced, my family is concerned with our dad’s and mom’s emotional needs and experiences. It was difficult to illustrate exactly what I wanted. My color theory is not very good so that is the main reason why I used minimal colors; it is very difficult to color because it takes so much time. My patience can grow thin. The second and last illustration I created was a comic that I thought of for the “First Week of School.” It was an obvious late illustration because I drew it months after the first week of school but classes, church, and depression did not give me enough motivation to start on the comic. Comics are not my forte so the paneling, thought and speech bubbles, and composition was very difficult to illustrate. I placed myself in most of the panels because it represented what I experienced in the classrooms in my college career. It is obvious through my character’s interaction with the situation that I did not enjoy those kinds of moments. I am naturally an introverted person so people who are not very thoughtful of their comments make me angry. Overall, the illustration portion of the recording of my life did not go well because I did not have enough time to draw the situations. It was difficult communicating what the day was like through an image, especially because “a picture is worth a thousand words.” I am a person of accuracy so I do not like vague ideas of my art. I also wanted to present a sense of my own perception through a drawing; again, I do not enjoy the fact that others perceive my situation differently than how I experienced it. There are times where art can be freely interpreted but my art is to be interpreted in one way. The video recordings made me nervous. When I first did the video blog, it was my first time using the webcam my friend sent me. The first time I recorded, the audio was too low so that was hard to work with. I think I am ugly but I tried not to pay attention to it while watching my own videos. When I recorded the videos at night, the contrast made it difficult to see my face which made the video pointless; it could have just been audio. With the image of where I do all of my blogging in the background, it gives the audience a clue of how and where I live. When I recorded at night, people told me that it was creepy that it had a dark background, a long hallway, and a partially opened door. But when I recorded during the day, it was much easier to watch the video and not as mysterious when I recorded at night. Recording the videos at day represents my personality well and sets the mood of the blog entry in a positive manner. In addition to the background, the way I talk in the videos is not the same way I talk in real life to my friends. I use much more hand gestures and gesticulation. It was difficult talking to the camera because I did not know where to place my eyes and it was very obvious to notice this when watching the video. When I was talking about an object, it was easy to show it in the video by presenting it in front of the camera. Personally, I think video blogging is the most accurate way of presenting one’s emotions. Even though I did not script a video, I believe that scripting ahead of time brings a better presentation and sense of the blogger. I only did one audio recording, one recording of digitally handwritten entry, and one recording of photos from my hand-held cell phone. Again, these entries were of what happened during the week. For the audio, since it was non-scripted, there was a lot of pauses and “uh” throughout the blog entry. Some of the pronunciations were incorrect and my tone of voice was very monotone. It definitely is a difference to just text and video. Even though video has the image and audio, listening to my voice alone made me imagine how I was talking with different facial expressions. The digitally recorded entry by handwriting was an interesting experience. It took a very long time compared to my text and other digital entries but the darker “ink” areas showed how much pressure I pressed down to write the words. The darker words were pronouns: “me” and “friend.” This might have been because I focus on the people while writing the event down. The world articles were of much lighter color and lesser importance than descriptive words and nouns. I was able to draw //emoticons// (emotion icons) in the way that it should be written instead of text emoticons like “<:(”. These two digital recording techniques were not as interesting, fun, and quick as the other digital media I used. Taking pictures and posting them up on my blog was very fun. The images were taken throughout that day and it showed me the memories I had. It is not as descriptive to the audience because they did not experience my day with me. This blog entry was much more personal rather than explanatory to the audience. I wish I had more entries with photographs because it gave me accurate images of what happened during the day and night. The text blogging was just like any other blog, just not as personal. Because I was working on this project, I put all my other blogs (my sketch blog, spiritual blog, and emotional blog) on hold. My text blog just contained recordings of my day and not my insights until the later entries. My project blog does not contain as many emoticons than I usually type in my other blogs because I tried to be as accurate as I could be. I tried different kinds of internet speak in my text blog entries to make them diverse. The “chat speak” (using short hand text) was very confusing for me. Ever since I started using the internet, which was in the 4th grade, I never used chat speak or short hand except for “lol” and “brb.” The entry seemed like I was an illiterate child trying to be cool by typing up blog entries for the cyber world to read. When I used different types of text placement (left, center, and right alignment), it was confusing because it was hard to read from left to right. My fragmented entries definitely portrayed the stress and emotion I was experiencing at the time. The entries were very short but ambiguous to understand. They are not as useful as other text entries because they are not as accurate to what happened in the day. Overall, this project should have lasted at least a year. In the beginning, it took awhile to think of what to type about and later it became more and more personal. I wish I had more access to other digital recording media: digital camera (film and photographs), audio recorder (portable), and tablet (laptop). This would have made sketches or quick shots of my life much easier and more accurate. Because blogs are meant to have interaction, I should have gathered a larger audience. Blogs are different than keeping a journal or a diary because those are recordings of one’s own thoughts that will not be read by others. Blogs are meant to have people reading and commenting on one’s entries. In Pachler and Daly (2009), it was said that blogs are “premised on the concept of narrative as a way in which individuals represent and organize experience in order to learn from it and make it shareable with others within social contexts.” And this was definitely true for my blog and many others I followed. That is also the reason why the other independent study students created a blog for their “Blogumentary” which was very creatively done. The two girls who worked on this //blogumentary// put up all the interviews, images, and videos they gathered to display to the cyber world. Their blog has gotten many more hits than mine; they worked on this for a whole academic year. The layout of the blog is much more organized, clean, and appealing to the reader’s eyes. Overtime, the blog layout changes because the blogger familiarizes himself or herself to the basic features enough that they can focus on making his or her blog better. I wish I spent a longer time and a more relaxed time this semester to work on this project. I had potential to draw more art, make more elaborate videos, and word my text blogs better. However, I still enjoyed this project so much more than my other courses because I constantly thought about what to write in my next entry. References Pachler, N., Daly, C. (2009). Narrative and learning with Web 2.0 technologies: Towards a research agenda. //Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 25//, 6-18. Subrahmanyam, K., Garcia, E. C. M., Harsono, L. S., Li, J. S., & Lipana, L. (2009). In their words: Connecting on-line weblogs to developmental processes. //British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 27//, 219-245.