Blogging in a Community

So, I didn't think I would say it, but I really enjoy blogging. I know I touched on those feelings in an earlier post, but it has become a nice release during my week. I think it has also helped me process what I read better! This week one of the articles I chose was one from Dr. Dennen about being apart of a blogging community. I know that I know what online communities are, but I guess I never really thought about blogging as one. I think it might stem from the fact that I was behind the blogging trend growing up. I was just too young to understand the hype of having one. And then as I got older, they were for recipes, home things, style, etc. so I was still not going to be an author of a blog. What intrigues me the most about blogging though and what Dr. Dennen's article pointed out to me were the different groups of people within blogging communities. There is the blogger, who post their own blogs, which is all of us in this class. There is the commenter, which can branch into a blogger who comments and someone who ONLY comments. There are the lurkers, who read the blogs and don't comment. And then the last two categories are passersby and characters who visit and don't become members of the community and people who are mentioned in the blogs by the authors. 

I think that it is easy to become just a commenter or a lurker in a blogging community or any online community really. I find myself reading Tweets and looking at Instagram posts without ever interacting with them. After reading Dr. Dennen's article, I asked myself questions. Why don't I interact? What are the posts that I typically interact with? Is there a trend that shows up?  

It will be interesting to look more into this, but for sure I will be practicing being apart of our blogging community by being the blogger who comments on others' posts. It feels like the best way to make the community a more cohesive place to reside. :)

Comments

  1. “You are much stronger than you think you are. Trust me.”May 26, 2022 at 3:14 PM

    Hi Sarah. I have to agree. I was not a fan of blogging before this. I am gettting better and more importantly enjoying the concept. So far i feel split on posts. Posts in reply to this class and then posts that relate to my nerd side. I do not always feel like i can talk about comics, disc golf at work so this has been a nice place to voice those areas. It also has been a justification to dig in those hobbies more.

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  2. Rachel WellmanMay 29, 2022 at 6:16 PM

    Hi Sarah. I like how you integrated Dr. Dennen's article with your own thinking and experiences. I also feel like I missed the sweet spot of blogging when it was the "hip" thing to be doing, but, like you, I also feel like it's become really important to me in a way that I wasn't expecting. It sounds like blogging communities are really closely linked to Communities of Practice, and I'm sure some of these communities actually function as CoPs, where you have people who are deeply embedded, a common language and resources used for communication, people on their way out etc. It's really interesting to think about!

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