Since the emergence of the Internet, users have been figuring out methods to opinionate, express, and represent themselves online. They have many choices of media through which to accomplish this, but two have become more popular than all other forms: blogging and social networking sites such as Facebook. With the former being the more popular, it has been estimated that there are over 70 million blogs on the net. Meanwhile, Facebook gains on average 200,000 users daily to make the total more than 40 million. Even with all this growth, are there differences between how these sites function in mass communication?
Blogs are meant to share and comment on news, photos, music, videos, and on anything else that users may want. They focus on a blogger posting something and allowing public users to access the blog, view it, and comment on it. In its simplest form, a blog is nothing more than just the sharing of new information. It does not offer much toward networking users together into a community, other than that they can subscribe to a blog and can see other users who did as well. The type of writing within text-based blogs is normally journalistic in nature, but is less constrained in the prose, as it is much more informal than, say, newspaper editorials.
Social networking websites such as, but not limited to Facebook are mainly focused on creating a forum for socializing online. Like blogs, users can post text, photos, and videos. However, Facebook’s users’ writing style is less informal than that of a blog. It is based in shorter, more personal messages to other users which allows users to speak to others in a more free and modern way. Usage of memes, abbreviations like ‘lol’, and other colloquial forms of communication is the preferred method of socializing on sites like Facebook. Unlike blogs, Facebook is less about sharing information like news and more about community and friendships among users.
So, blogs, normally, contain more information about a singular topic than social networking web pages and are a bit more formal in the writing style. This is because the information trying to be conveyed needs to be in a clear and readable style whereas on Facebook the information is not necessarily meant to be shared or is not necessarily informative even.
2 comments:
Josh,
Your analysis of what both Blogging and Facebook are were done very well. You successfully compared and contrasted what each of these types of sites are for. You show knowledge of both sites which is a convincing part of your argument to the reader.
Very convincing paper. Your insight shows that youre very knowledgeable of what youre writing about.
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