12 - Bloggerama

What is it that we really like about blogs? It is because we finally get that chance to be that newspaper columnist that everyone listens to for advice? On the other hand, maybe it is because we finally get a chance to share our true feelings with hopes that someone will listen. Whatever the reason, it all comes back to the fact that bloggers want to be heard. Therefore, what is the future of blogs? It’s simple, as technology grows, so will the aspects of blogs including how we express our feelings or opinions online. With more pictures and simpler ways to make blogs and change the fonts and colors, blogs will become more personalized to the writer. Just look at how our class blog has tremendously expanded throughout the course in a span of only 4 months. Can you imagine what the future holds?

As a result, this will have an immense impact on some of the aspects of the theories that hold true today. For instance, the Social Presence Theory and Reduced Social Context Theory both address that CMC predominantly causes poorly developed, impoverished and even negative impression formation. However, with increased fonts and pictures, blogs will say more about the person than ever, making the impressions less impoverished than they are now. Whether or not the impressions are negative will vary, but more clues can do as much good as bad, telling more about the person and speeding up the slower impression formation in CMC that the SIP theory states.

As a result, this class will have to start teaching new ways to evaluate and get to know people online. For example, what the font size or color says not only about their gender or age, but also about their personality. Just like how people can read body language and tell a lot about a person’s character by their handwriting, a new book of decoding will have to be written for blogs. Currently, the class teaches about how a person’s language in emails can give clues to their gender, but what will be discovered about the visual clues in blogs revealing personality clues are limitless and fascinating.

Nevertheless, the aspect of anonymity is undeniably one of the most attractive incentives of the Internet. Therefore, there will always have to be a cap as to how much a blog really will tell about a person. Things might still develop slower than they will in FtF, but the future holds cooler blogs than ever, which means we will just have to become just as cool and step up to the plate to tackle the blogs of our future.