6 PERSPECTIVES
www.theloquitur.com
Perspectives
Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008
It’s all about blogging, baby! IN MY OPINION
JANENE GIBBONS staff writer
jmg727@cabrini.edu
Blogs, blogs, blogs! Not only are blogs the latest trend, they are the new “it” medium to use to network yourself and share your personality, through writing, with the world, that is if you have one. Blogs are a great way to “publish” your work for free. Through a simple search or tag on your own blog, which takes about a minute to create, millions of people, personalities, news and information lie at the tips of your fingers. The basic blogs consisting mostly of posts on any subject imaginable are displayed on the Web for people all over the world to see. Blogs are effective because they reach and target such a wide and diverse audience. The words “Web” and “world” are becoming more synonymous everyday. The Web is becoming the new form of communication that people use to relate to each other. The fact that blogs are taking over the Web makes me feel that people are really trying to create a global, intellectual com-
Jake Verterano/A&E Editor
You don’t have to be Perez Hilton to voice opinion .Weebly, Blogspot and many other Web sites make blogging easy. munity through sharing not only their writing, but what events and trends are newsworthy to them. However, at the same time, I think blogs can lead to overexposure and almost a self-induced invasion of privacy if you write your blogs on something really personal in your life. This, in my opinion, is what could make blogs a doubleedged sword. As I browsed around on Wordpress, Blogspot and Weebly, I found blogs on an incredible range of drastically different topics. On Weebly, one lady made an entire blog on her wedding including how she
and her groom met, provided details of the wedding, the guestbook, the gift registry, a list and description of each wedding party member and an extensive slideshow. I thought it was creepy how her featured blog gave out the exact location of her wedding to total strangers. I understand that blog might have been made for relatives who live far away or spread out across the state, country or maybe even the other side of the world, but I think I would have put my settings to private and emailed my family or friends the link to my blog instead. On Wordpress, there
was a story about a woman who lives in Hollywood who was up for a leading role but was deemed too fat by the director within seconds of meeting her. This drew me in because acting is my future profession, and I become outraged by Hollywood’s obsession with being thin. I became glued to the screen of my computer and was encapsulated in another person’s life for a moment. Both of these blogs remind me of the tabloids and the overexposure that I think our society secretly craves and gets a daily fix of with Facebook and MySpace. Everyone hav-
ing to know every little detail about your life isn’t writing. It’s like taking your diary and putting it into the hands of the public and saying “here.” It’s some people’s 15 minutes of fame. They feel like a celebrity, and everyone wants to feel like a celebrity these days with the advent of “reality TV” shows. Blogs of the stars are like reality TV shows put into print, so I refused to read them because that would be taking away the illusion I have of them as actors, singers or what have you and I enjoy that illusion.
I did check out perezhilton.com and found it to be a major waste of time looking at pictures all directly bashing celebrities, gossip and rumors. I would rather watch Chelsea Handler on “Chelsea Lately,” but that’s just me. I enjoy her format more. However, this is not to say I am against blogs of any kind. I actually liked a lot of the blogs reporting on news because it wasn’t just your stereotypical headlines and it was more interesting because the blogs didn’t have to follow all the strict formatting rules of journalism. I also loved how you could actually use varied forms of media in your blog such as Flicker images or Google videos. This made it much more interactive than something you would read in print. I myself am required to have a blog linked to my radio biography on the Web for WYBF 89.1 “The Burn,” Cabrini’s radio station. We started this to extend our social networking and have our listeners feel like they know us more. My first post was on art, and I quite enjoyed it. So after struggling with my two different opinions, I have decided that I do think blogs are a hip, new, effective and freer form of multimedia and communication as long as they are used to inform or entertain and do not give too much personal information that could cause harm to the creator of the blog.
And you thought your dorm was crappy?
Chinese college students have more problems than close quarters IN MY OPI N I ON
ERIN NOLLEN staff writer
ekn722@cabrini.edu
When it’s time for kids to leave for college, they’re usually excited to live on their own—no rules, no parents, no curfew. The only thing they aren’t ex-
cited for is the small dorm rooms. A lot of us here in the states think we have it bad. We usually complain about not having enough room and that it’s dirty, but kids across the world in Beijing, China have it a lot worse. Here at Cabrini , most students have a total of two people per room, in some cases rooms can have up to three or four people. If you’re living in the Cabrini Apartment Complex, you can have up to six. Six people sounds like a lot but they are apartments with three bedrooms and two baths.
In Beijing, they have the same size dorm rooms that we have here in the states except for one big difference: they have a total of six people in one room. We complain when there’s only two to a room and they have six people. Imagine sharing a room in Xavier with six people. Here at Cabrini Woodcrest doesn’t have any air conditioning but every other building does. In Beijing, they have no air conditioning whatsoever. Here, we can leave our windows open if it is hot, but if you live in the dorms in Beijing, if you open the
windows you better have mosquito nets everywhere to catch the bugs that will come in the window. It’s safe to say we have things pretty easy here when you find out what other people have to go through for little things such as water. Here, we have bottles of water in our room. In Beijing, if you want a cup of hot water you have to walk a quarter of a mile to get it. Most college students are never too concerned with doing laundry; some kids even drop their laundry off at home for their moms to do it. I know
when I lived in Xavier I always complained that there weren’t enough washers and dryers and half the time they didn’t even work. When I found out that kids in Beijing have to wash all their laundry by hand and then hang it to dry, I felt spoiled. There are a lot of things we take for granted here and I think showering is one of them. Here, we can jump in the shower whenever we want. We could shower eight times a day if we wanted to. It happens to be very different in Beijing. You can’t just jump in the
shower when you feel like it. You have to set a time to use the bathroom and when you use it you are using it with everyone else. There is no privacy and you have to walk a quarter of a mile to the bath house. Here, you can stand in the shower as long as you want. There you get charged on how long you take to shower. Personally, I would have a hard time following those rules or sharing one room with six girls. I think we all have it pretty good here at Cabrini and we should think next time we complain about the laundry machines or showering.