I think that the way I approach by blog depends on the
avenue in which I am blogging, and whom I perceive to be my audience.
For example, all of my current blogging is through Blogger
and school related, so my blog topics pertain to whatever the assignment asks
of me. Because of these factors, despite the blog being public, I just assume
that my audience is only my professors and classmates. This affects my blogging
because I am not necessarily concerned with sounding cool or pushing a lot of
my personality into my work as much as I am focused on completing the
assignment. Another assumption that I make is that people outside of class
wouldn’t be interested in my blogging because it is so specific to topics that
they have no knowledge of. So those are a couple of factors that contribute to
my current style of blogging.
In comparison, I used to keep a personal blog on Tumblr.
This is a different situation because for this blog my main focus was about
looking “cool” and representing my personality through mostly photos, videos,
music and some writing. This publicity of that blog affected the way that I
blogged because I was under the impression that strangers could be interested
in what I was saying and posting and I wanted to keep it interesting for others
and myself—rather than now when I am blogging exclusively academically.
In both situations, I would say that I never felt that my
writing felt “high-risk” at all. I have never been the type of person to be
publicly opinionated or controversial, so I think simply because of my
personality, this has never been something that has been a concern. What I
enjoy about blogging (in both ways) is that it is a more casual way of writing.
I feel less tied down by formatting and professionalism and encouraged to use
my real voice more so than an academic one.
