“Embracing Digital Literacies: A Study of First-Year Students’ Digital Compositions”

by Bay VanWagenen | Xchanges 10.2/11.1

Blogging Genre Conventions

The students seemed to agree that while serious or personal topics are not often received well on Facebook, they are readily accepted on blogging sites such as Blogspot or Tumblr. Students saw blogs as the more appropriate genre to write about personal musings or opinions. For instance, Natalie shared a blog post where she describes her changing taste in music. In her blog entry, she reminisces about music she used to enjoy at a young age:

I listened to those songs because they were catchy … also because I joined the bandwagon and that’s what everybody was listening to! Now my music is changing … I personally love rock and heavy metal. The music is real and it’s not like the “bubblegum pop” … music we have today. I could go on and on about it buuuttttt that’s a different blog for a different time. But going back to the subject at hand, my music is STILL changing!

Natalie finds her blog to be the better medium for reflecting upon and exploring a topic. Because she felt limited in what she could or could not say on Facebook, Natalie began writing a blog:

I think … what’s different is that with the blogging site I feel like you can talk more openly about anything because there are always people who share the same ideas as you. But … on Facebook I very much feel confined because I don’t want to attack anybody, but not to say that on my blog I’m attacking people, but Facebook just feels more confined to say, where blogger.com you can basically talk about anything and just put your ideas down.

Because of the confined feeling Natalie has when writing on Facebook, she turns to her blog to share her opinions on world news events, local politics, relationships, and other topics that are important to her in what she calls blog “rants.” Natalie hesitates to write about these kinds of topics on Facebook, but openly discusses them on her blog.