INTRODUCTION

 

As I write this, I can’t help but feel like someone who’s just sort of jumping on the bandwagon. Over the past few years I’ve witnessed several of my friends and family members start their own blog sites and start using Facebook to advertise their posts. I’ve read quite a few of them and am always amazed by how good some of them are. So of course there was a part of me that was greatly inspired by these people and I thought, if they can do it, why can’t I? However, there’s always been a part of me that has wanted to start a blog even before I started noticing my friends doing it. I’m not sure what it is that has caused this sudden boom in new blog sites from my friends. It could just be that we’ve reached the age where we feel confident enough in our writing. Or maybe it’s because technology has made it easier for anyone to make a website. Either way, I find it interesting that in a world with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, people are still gravitating towards old fashioned blogging. So I guess the question for me is:

Why start a blog and why now?

I’ll answer the second question first because it’s slightly easier. The reason for starting this blog now can be said with one word. Time. When I was younger and blogging was still a new and unique thing to do, I never had much interest in it. It just didn’t seem like anything I could see myself doing. Not to mention my writing skills probably weren’t that great yet and I hadn’t experienced enough in life to write something worthwhile. As I grew older, and especially when I reached college, I began to really want to find a way to get my thoughts out besides just Facebook and twitter. I thought about starting a blog several times but never committed to it. The main issue I had was time. It takes me an insanely long time to write anything I’m truly satisfied with. I can write school papers and project papers incredibly fast if I’ve procrastinated. But when I write about things I really care about, I want them to be as good as possible. It took me probably about ten revisions just to get the opening sentence of this introduction to where I was satisfied with it, (and I’m still not sure about it. Sometime I might post all of the past opening sentences I came up with). Now you might think that this would be a good thing. After all, revising and taking your time are keys to producing quality work. But it becomes a real problem when you revise things so many times that eventually you loose interest completely and give up. And that is exactly what happens to me all the time. I start things and then never finish them because I don’t think they’ll ever be good enough. With this blog I want to change that. Now that I’m done with school I have a lot more time to devote to writing and I might finally be able to finish something that I really want to do. That was a much longer answer than I had originally planned but…oh well. So why start a blog at all? What is the purpose? For me, blogging is great for one big reason: It allows you to express your thoughts without interruption and without limitation. When expressing your thoughts on other social media, you’re often confined to a certain length. Too long of a Facebook status and no one will really pay attention to it. Too long of a tweet and Twitter won’t let you post it. In real life conversations, people tend to think mostly of themselves. This leads to conversations that evolve into either bragging or sympathy battles. Each person will try to steer the conversation towards themselves while not really listening to the other person. While reading a blog post, however, people are forced to read your entire thoughts on something without interrupting you or arguing right away. (Now on the downside, comment sections on blogs or other social media can lead to nasty arguments where debating becomes much worse than it would if they were debating in real life, but I won’t get into those issues now). The main point here is that everyone has had unique life experiences, and through these experiences they have developed unique points of view on various things in life. Reading someone’s blog is one of the best ways to get to know someone and see things from their point of view. I love getting to read about other peoples experiences, stories, and perspectives that they might not have otherwise told me about in person. And that is why I personally wanted to start this blog, to share my thoughts on certain things that most people wouldn’t get to hear from me on a daily bases. So then that leaves the question:

What will this blog be about?

Before I began writing this post, I looked up tips on starting a blog. A common tip among the many websites I looked at was this: Have a theme and stick to that theme. While I understand why this is a common tip, I’m not going to stick with this advice. The idea behind this tip is that having a theme will ensure that you maintain a core group of readers interested in that theme. If you deviate from that theme you risk losing readers. But for me, this blog is mostly about getting my thoughts and perspectives out there to people I care about such as friends and family. If one day I become more popular and I actually start a real website, completely my own, then I might try to stick with a theme, but for now I guess you could say my theme is just “me”. If I had to pick a dominant theme, it would be film. I’m mostly going to talk about movies, but I also want to talk about things like technology and science, as well as whatever else randomly comes to mind.

Final note:

Advances in technology have made it easier for anyone to make their own blog site for free and without the need to know how to program. I like to compare it to film-making and how technology has made it easier for almost anyone to make their own movie just by using a smartphone. And similar to film, this means that there is a lot more content out there. This can be both good and bad. Bad because anyone can write anything, just like anyone can make a movie….even people who probably shouldn’t be because they don’t really know what they’re doing. On the flip side, some very talented people who may never have been able to do these things had technology not been around, now have a chance. So yes, there’s more crap, but there’s more good too. You just have to sift through more content to find the good. I’m saying this because I fear that my own blog might end up being terrible. I did not major in English or writing, in fact I majored in Electrical Engineering, so my writing will not be nearly as good as some. In addition, as I said before, I take forever to write so I won’t be putting out new posts super frequently. But I hope that whenever I do manage to post something it will be worth the time to read.