Ke$ha Ain't Got Nothin' On Me

So, I woke up in the morning (feeling like P. Diddy, no less), and I thought to myself: this is going to be my last semester of university. I then proceeded to express myself through a series of profanities unfit for a blog that my professor will be reading. Suffice it to say, I’m upset about this. I don’t know what to do with myself once school is done. I know I want to enter the field of journalism, and that I have a passion for writing; I just like doing it. What I also know is that I have spent four years of my life in university in order to gain an academic and strategic way of analyzing and understanding people’s perspectives, opinions, scholarly writings, films, novels, the list goes on.

I have never been one to look at blogs, to be quite honest. It’s probably because I’ve been sceptical about their content and quality, and I don’t think my life has been missing anything. I figure, if I want to know someone’s opinion on something, I’ll talk to people I know on the subject and have an intellectual conversation. I don’t need to go out of my way and waste my time on reading a stranger’s opinion, an opinion I likely disagree with. Plus, people on the Internet are mean. They’re able to hide behind their glowing computer monitors and hand out their overbearing cynicism as if I asked for it. Just visit OH NO THEY DIDN'T and click on any one story and read the frustratingly abusive words some people have to say. I’m sorry, I’m ranting.

What I’m attempting to get around to is that my distaste, if you will, is not for blogging as a whole, but calling blogging “journalism”. And yes, I have been in post-secondary for four years now, educating my passion for journalism, journalistic integrity and preparing my analytical mind for the field. So sue me if I’m a little aggravated that, if we’re calling blogging journalism, and everyone can set up a blog, then the journalistic profession is somewhat discredited. Whether it’s providing their opinion on Haiti, links to funny sites, or sharing with us what they ate for lunch, blogs are more like diaries than reputable journalistic news articles. This is why I rejoiced when I read Rebecca Blood’s articles. Blood asks herself if blogging is the “new” form of journalism, and she writes:

“Frankly, no. I'm not practicing journalism when I link to a news article reported by someone else and state what I think —I've been doing something similar around the water cooler for years. I'm engaged in research, not journalism, when I search the Web for supplementary information in order to make a point. Reporters might do identical research while writing, but research alone does not qualify an activity as journalism.”

Thank you! Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I did not spend the last four years as an English Literature and Communications Studies major to be told that a person who does research and posts youtube videos they like is a form of journalism. If you didn’t already know, I completely agree with Blood, and would much rather call blogging “Participatory Media”. It fits much nicer. And this way, I don’t have to feel like I’ve wasted four years of my life. Let’s not get confused though – I know that blogging absolutely has its merits, which I’ll most likely delve into in my next blog posts, and our course is opening my mind up to this more and more every lecture. But for now I can sleep easy, without any need to curse or swear when I wake up in the morning. Except for the fact that I referenced a line from Ke$ha at the beginning of this. That’s kind of upsetting.