By Nicholas Proch
As we’ve reached an age where the news in this country has come to be more personalized to the individual, certain changes have happened and are currently happening as you are reading this sentence. The need for a printed paper seems to be less with each passing day. With almost every media outlet having a matching counterpart on the web, you can still access the news from the syndicate you want, but on your own terms.
Social networking has created a culture where it is acceptable to express yourself freely on the web. What a newspaper offers is very linear. It can only be printed once and can’t be an ongoing conversation like a website can be. On nearly all websites you can find a comment or discussion section. In this section you can usually find so many different opinions that, in the end, it may even be overwhelming. However, because you can see every comment, the reader can pass their own judgement on the topic at hand. No longer is the reader subjected to the comments from only a few who have written to the editor.
There was a certain point when the world realized that every individual can have a voice, but there wasn’t yet a clean outlet to be able to express it. The next logical step was to take the editorial section and combine it with this new mass medium known as the Internet. What was born was a lovechild named ‘blog’. A combination of the words ‘web’ and ‘log’, its title only tells us part of the story. A blog is a place where anyone can express their opinions to people beyond their coffee shop. If someone in Wichita, Kan. has an opinion on my latest entry about our political system they can contact me without having to buy stamps.
To further bolster this idea, a study by the New York Times done several years ago showed that websites such as LiveJournal were gaining an average of 1,100 new bloggers a day. That may seem like a staggering amount of bloggers and audience members that you could reach especially when you consider where they are coming from. The United States has the most bloggers in the world followed by, of all countries, Brazil.
Blogging is connecting our world in more ways than ever. As the globe is getting smaller, our voices are getting larger. We are no longer dependent on the printed paper to have our opinions heard. If you haven’t done so already, take advantage of the colossal audience you can reach. Get out and blog.