Throughout the course of history, communication media has been constantly changing and making methods of communicating increasingly easy. For example, the invention of the telephone allowed direct conversation to be made from two different locations and the invention of the television allowed information to be transmitted visually to a large number of audience. Being one of the popular communication media today, blogging has also transformed people’s way of life. Blogging originally started during the Internet era; although it is a fairly new communication medium, the concept behind the self-publishing of information, news, and thoughts, is not. The idea of self-publication existed long before the creation of the Internet and has been around since the industrial era, when the printing press revolutionized the means of communication. Several precedents, such as diaries and zines, existed back then and as technology advanced, they gradually developed and evolved to what we have today called blogs.
During the industrial and pre-industrial period, the Internet did not exist; therefore, thoughts and information were often recorded in journals and transmitted through word-of-mouth and letters (Cosby, 2000). This medium of communication was not effective in terms of mass communication, as there were constraints such as the distance of distribution and number of copies of the information; as a result, only a small number of people were able to access them. During the industrial revolution, around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, though the printing press had already existed more than 300 years before, the improved and more efficient production of printed media sparked the new era of publishing (Fyfe, 2006). During that time, newspapers and books were being mass published and they were able to spread the news further and to more people; this idea of mass publication marks the beginning of blogging.
After the industrial revolution and before the Internet era, from the 1930s until the 1990s, a derivation of blogs, called zines, existed and they were the most popular method of getting one’s personal thoughts and opinions out to the public. Zines, short for fanzines, are “amateur publications which are normally created and distributed by their author or, in some cases, a small team of people” (Dykeman, 2009). They are often written and published independently by average people who are passionate about certain topics to write about them. Authors would spend time and money to publish their thoughts on paper just so that they would be heard by the public. Though zines and blogs are similar to each other the fact that they both involve self-publication, one should not compare them directly because they have their differences in terms of methods of publication. Zines were first produced in the 1930s by science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts and later on were succeeded by punk music which resulted in a booming popularity around the 1980s and 90s (Rubinstein, 2007). Soon after that, zines of all kinds of topics, from politics to religion to arts and film, were widely available (Cooper, 2007; Rubinstein, 2007). Because of their similarities in concepts and contents, zines are therefore considered the precedents of blogs and blogs are known as “an extension of zines” (Rubinstein, 2007).
Since the late 1960s, when the Internet was invented and computers were slowly embedding into people’s daily lives, many forms of communication media were created such as websites and emails; the first blog ever, Links.net, was then created in January 1994 (Carvin, 2007; Thompson, 2006). Although websites and emails, which are still used extensively and appreciated today, are a good way of publishing information and conveying thoughts, they do not have the interaction that blogs provide. While websites can contain vast amount of information, it is static whereas blogs can have the ability to receive comments and feedbacks from readers (Halavais, 2004).
Blogging has had a big impact on society and has advanced since the time it started. When the first blogs were created, only web enthusiasts with the knowledge of the computer language were able to operate and manage the site properly therefore there were only a few sites that could be categorized as blogs (Blood, 2000). As the Internet improved and more simplified publishing programs were created, self-publication or blogging became very easy and manageable; as a result, the number of blogs grew exponentially. According to Technorati, a search engine for blogs, 133 million blogs were indexed since 2002 (Technorati, 2008). Because of its convenience and speed of publication, ordinary people are able to create and update blogs easily without any technical or programming skills (Wyld, 2007). Blogs are not only used as online personal diaries documenting people’s daily lives, they are also used as commentaries. As more people read and write blog entries, more discussions and contributions are made by others, which affects society’s opinions and perspective as a whole. Blogging also impacts individuals positively because it promotes amateur journalism. It gives young writers a chance to voice out their opinion easily without having to go through the trouble of print publication. Apart from the personal use, many companies and even politicians have also adopted the use of blogs to communicate and maintain relationships with the public (Wyld, 2007).
Although blogging is a relatively new technology, it has an immense history. From the pre-industrial to industrial and post-industrial era, this technology has emerged from various communication media and its development has positively affected individuals and society. In a world where technologies are constantly changing, one should appreciate technologies’ precedents and history as they are the foundation of today’s advanced technologies that help us communicate and go through our daily lives with ease.
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References
Blood, R. (2000, September 7). Weblogs: a history and perspective. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html
Carvin, A. (2007, December 24). Timeline: the life of the blog. Retrieved March 14, 2009, from the National Public Radio Website: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17421022
Cooper, R. (2007, June 27). The 24 hour zine thing…the revolution will be self-published. Retrieved March 13, 2009, from http://punkmusic.about.com/b/2007/06/27/the-24-hour-zine-thing-the-revolution-will-be-self-published.htm
Cosby, B. (n.d.). African Americans and the age of information. Retrieved March 15, 2009, from http://www.geocities.com/afritech_2000/
Dykeman, M. (2009, March 3). The secret origin of blogging that no one discusses. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from http://broadcasting-brain.com/2009/03/03/secret-origin-blogging/
Fyfe, A. (2006). Information revolution: William Chambers, the publishing pioneer. Endeavour. 30(4), 120-125. Retrieved March 14, 2009, from Science Direct.
Halavais, A. (2004, November 14). Histories and definitions of blogging. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from http://alex.halavais.net/histories-and-definitions-of-blogging/
Rubinstein, M. (2007, July 20). Zines and blogs. Retrieved March 12, 2009, from http://mattrubinstein.com.au/?page_id=122
State of the blogosphere 2008. (n.d.). Retrieved March 14, 2009, from the Technorati Website: http://technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
Thompson, C. (2006, February 13). The early years. Retrieved March 13, 2009, from The New York Magazine Website: http://nymag.com/news/media/15971/
Wyld, D. (2007). The blogging revolution: government in the age of web 2.0. IBM Endowment for The Business of Government. Retrieved March 14, 2009, from www.businessofgovernment.org/pdfs/WyldReportBlog.pdf
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