Freedom In Blogs Is It Useful Or Useless?

The blog writing and reading is a thing that is very new to me. The first time I ever read or wrote a blog was in 9th grade when Mr. Tangen assigned us to do one for our readings. After that I started to gain some experience with the blogs and started to explore this new way of expressing ideas. Apart from knowing how to post in my blog and read the homework for the next day I didn’t know anything about blogs. Many things changed when I read this article about blogs. I learned new things that I did not know previously about them and started to see that it is a really innovative way of expression. Blogs don’t have to be structured like a book. A blog can express and say whatever the author wants to say and how he wants to say it. This is good to have certain degree of freedom to express ourselves but there might be some problems. If they don’t follow any rules they can write whatever they want even if it is misspelled or false information. “They don't even stop to punctuate. And if they can't put quite the right inflection on a sentence, they'll often use an OMG (Oh my god!) or an emoticon, e.g., a smiley face :-) or a wink ;-) or a frown :-( instead of words.” I know that blogs are a fast way of obtaining the information you want and you may think it might be right to abbreviate phrases and feelings, or do run on sentences to make it go faster. But really if a blog ends up having so many abbreviations, run on sentences and spelling mistakes it may misleading for the person who is reading. Another big problem that I noticed from reading this article was that there is so much freedom that you can write things that aren’t true about history or spelling or even news. “They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education.” What is being said is that blogs can also be used to tell lies. Imagine that one day you get home really late and need to do homework about how the French people’s lifestyle was in the 1800s. You go into your computer and find this really good blog that says all you need to know. You are not completely sure if it is credible so you look up the name of the author in Google and find out that he is a historian of some university and it is a credible source. You decide to use this webpage and when you hand it in and the paper gets returned to you, you find out that all that was in there were lies. I also learned many positive aspects from learning more about blogs. I learned that you can get events narrated by different persons. “Every sport, every war, every hurricane brings out a crop of bloggers, who often outdo the mainstream media in timeliness, geographic reach, insider information, and obsessive detail.” This is the positive side of that freedom that you can get information really quick and have a diversity of point of views. Also sometimes the news can be biased so this is a very useful tool because people who lived some events can posed a non biased version. The problem with this freedom is that anything can be written in a blog without control of any kind so it can be a very useful tool or a bad tool.