Blogs give us a voice

Thanks to everyone who sent a message about my bruised face. I'm fine and feeling even better today. I think I have the sweetest readers on the internet.

xxx ♥ xxx 

Although I didn't know what a blog was ten years ago, now blogging is part of my daily life. The internet has given us all the freedom to roam internationally and what we write now has the potential to be read world-wide. I love that because when I grew up, children, particularly girls, where expected to be seen and not heard. Those old ways changed drastically in the early 1960s when, among other things, The Beatles arrived and music started giving teenagers a voice. I don't think I've stopped talking since.

Still, no matter how much we had to say, the media - TV, radio, newspapers, magazines etc. acted as filters for our thoughts. If someone wanted to do an article or program on a certain kind of home or way of living, first you'd have a reporter giving her or his interpretation of it, the editing process would further refine it and the way it was eventually portrayed might be quite different to how things really were. Until blogs came along, we had to be chosen to be written about, now we've all got our own printing press sitting inside our computers and we all can publish whatever we like.

Blogs have given all of us the ability to be heard, so we can advocate on behalf of our local school, we can criticise or praise our politicians, we can write words no magazine would publish, or we can write about and photograph our domestic lives, our families and how to knit dishcloths until the cows come home and no one with an agenda or the opposite viewpoint can to stop us. Yes, blogs have given us the power to communicate to an audience. That is a good thing.

I love the authenticity of blogs. Instead of the old way of viewing everything through someone else's filter, now women and men are writing their own stories, taking their own photographs and telling us how it really is. There is good and bad in that because now we have all those blogs writing their own authentic stories but it brings with it a lot of writing that would benefit from an editor's pencil. It's not always authentic either. We all have our own ways of selecting favourite blogs. I tend to go back to the blogs that are well written and have non-staged photographs. I want to see how things really are. I don't want a staged version of it.

So now here we are with the means to write what we want to write and for that to be available for reading all over the world. It's a powerful thing. I'd like to encourage more people to blog because there is always room for more interesting blogs and for writers with fresh ideas. Blogging gives a lot to the writer too. It provides the best kind of life record for you and your family and you never know, you might write exactly what's needed and build a popular blog. Tomorrow I'll blog about setting up a Blogger blog in the hope of motivating those of you who don't blog.  In the meantime, I'd love to hear about your blogging experiences or why you don't blog now.