A Blog Like No Other!

With apologies to Virginia Woolf,
After reading this article, I should conclude that in my day women were treated this way quite often. Women were merely objects similar to houses or pets, and could certainly not easily own property. In my written work, “A Room of One’s Own,” I discuss how a woman in Shakespeare’s position would not have stood a chance at recognition for her talent as he had. She indeed would not have been up to producing such works of genius because women in that time and mine were not allowed the education that men were. We were merely expected to run a household, bear children and live our days that way until our death. To come back to the article aforementioned, women here are described trading sex for green cards when money could not be found to use. In my book, I mention how beating women was, in certain circumstances considered acceptable such as if a woman refused an arranged marriage. Marriage was rarely based on true love, but on a pact set between the families from soon after the children’s birth. Here I quote from my work a passage most fitting in this circumstance of subject matter.
“Indeed, if women had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is a woman in fiction. In fact, . . . she was locked up, beaten and flung across the room” (Woolf 45).
This passage can be related to the trapped feeling women in this article feel when they want a green card but have no money. The women are pressured by immigration agents, who are the law enforcement to trade their bodies for United States citizenship. It shows that little has changed since my time where women were regarded more as property than people.
While glancing over the text of chapter four I recalled how I had written of how means by way of money helped women find their voice in my day. All the notable woman writers were wealthier, which thus allowed them their solitude and accordingly helped produce some of the notable books of my age. Means and solidarity were by no means easy to come upon however; women were either left land in a will or inherited money from a relative. Breaking from the harsh mold of society was a task worthy of recognition for not many succeeded in doing just that.

Find this article titled ‘Sex (with a married woman)= green card’ at: http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/03/21/sex-with-a-married-woman-greencard/

The New York Times is a prominent newspaper that is supposed to be non-biased and fairly portray the news as it is. Saying this, why are five out of six main pictures on today’s online front page of men? This paper shows that, to an outsider this paper makes the United States look like a patriarchy. Before I read a paper, what catches my eye first is a picture and pictures say a lot, at least on this front page. The first one is of one presidential candidate, Obama (a man) and proceeds to talk of his victory in the Mississippi Primary. He is smiling and confident looking, then a step below this both literally and psychologically, there is a man helping a boy. Then to the left there is a man leading a woman off stage. There are a few more pictures, but these say it all in a nutshell. Man equals power is demonstrated quite obviously by showing a man running for president, man equals savior is shown by a man helping a boy from the ground in Pakistan and finally man equals guidance is shown all too directly in the picture of a man leading a woman off a stage. This says it all. All that Virginia Woolf talks about in “A Room of One’s Own” is shown right here, or at least most of it.
The differences between the newspaper headlines in Woolf’s book and the headlines in today’s “Times” are most certainly different, but the visual message they encourage remains steadfast and unbalanced. Woolf’s narrator reads about how men decide who is guilty of a murder crime and that women are wrong to want divorce. Then they throw in the day’s weather as if they give little more thought to that than to news of humans (Woolf 33). Granted times have changed, but women’s rights have not changed nearly enough to match the years that have elapsed.

“As for readers worldwide, blogs can act as the “man on the street,” supplying unfiltered eyewitness accounts about foreign countries.”

In Kline and Burnstein’s book Blog! it talks about the power blogs have on society and also how blogs are more and more becoming vital sources of information. In other words, where once there was an abundant number of foreign correspondants, blogs have taken over. The “man on the street” is essentially blogs providing information about foreign countries that would otherwise be unknown. Consider this, for example. If the news reporters here in America had barely any knowledge of the culture we are at war with, (well, they practically don’t, but that’s beside the point) they would then turn to blogs as a source of information. They could go to any number of Middle Eastern blog sites, because a great number exist and find out what the culture is like. Likewise, they could go to any other kinds of blogs pertaining to the Middle East and find information that would be of vital importance to them.

After reading about how DailyKos and Wonkette, two popular blogs that comment on current news, were started I must say that I am more attracted to Wonkette. Its humor is more interesting and drew me in more than the more bland quality of DailyKos. Wonkette’s site has funny headings that draw in the reader and make the reader want to read more on the site. Its girlish picture at the top of the site makes it seem hip and modern, whereas DailyKos has no illustrations or intro at the top of its site. When I went to Wonkette the humorous heading atop a picture of Bush immediately captivated me. I proceeded to the rest of the article about the picture and then was compelled to read the rather funny remarks readers had posted below.
I would much rather read a humorous political commentary to a dry one any day.
DailyKos reminds me of my parents. Something they would cook up to vent their frustrations at the current government situation. This is not a bad thing per se, but to hear more of that is not very interesting.
Wonkette on the other hand is like the Colbert Report, a funny political satire that helps one to get an inking of what’s up in the white house without seeming too rhetoric.

On http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2003/02/26.html, Robert Scoble explains the fundamentals of writing a good blog. Here I will quickly review an article I found interesting and discuss whether it is believable according to Scoble’s guidelines. According to an article from http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Report_1_in_every_100_Americans_0228.html, more than one in every one hundred people in the United States is in prison. This creates a higher cost for each state as quote: “The report, released today by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier.” This seems like a valid statement. David Crary, the author of this article on rawstory, has given solid facts that one can easily look up for confirmation on the truth of the article.
“The largest percentage increase — 12 percent — was in Kentucky, where Gov. Steve Beshear highlighted the cost of corrections in his budget speech last month. He noted that the state’s crime rate had increased only about 3 percent in the past 30 years, while the state’s inmate population has increased by 600 percent.”
The rest of the article is all for the most part based in whether the facts are true or not. As for the other principles of writing a good blog, well, I don’t see many here. Number three of Scoble’s rules, Use a Human Voice is done in this article, and they don’t use crazy language. It is simple and easy to follow.

Although blogging has become such a popular thing to do, Japanese blogger Joi Ito still believes it can retain some personal aspects. For example Ito believes that the way to maintaining a civil blog site is to make it personal. Hence he named his blog site after his name in order to enforce a sense of ownership and control over guest bloggers who visit his site. Likewise Ito believes that the increase of bloggers he sees on his site and others like his will create a more personal atmosphere for the Internet. Ultimately it would entail a return of more folk themes, folk music and art. Similarly Ito believes the boom of blogs will create an alternate to mass media. For instance right now there are a few big box stores such as Barnes & Noble that serve a large percentage of people, but with the blog boom, online booksellers who will accordingly be able to provide many more products that are non-mainstream will override these box stores.

Blogging was a newer creation three years ago, but what has not changed is the popularity of it. A quote from Kline and Burnstein’s Blog! reveals just how popular blogs are on a daily basis. “… 23,000 blogs are being built every day; the BusinessWeek story ups that to 40,000.” Blogging is the tool the general public uses to stay in touch, to share opinions, and to share music and videos (among many other such things shared online). Blog! compares the spread of blogs to the spread of print with the start of the printing press in 1440. Blogging is continuing to become the network of now.
Though businesses are also adopting blogs as a source of advertising and keeping up with the general consensus on their products, I believe that non-business blog sites are popping up and becoming much more popular. With the start of podcasts and more widely available music and videos, the Internet and blog sites have increased popularity tenfold. “… Curry created software called iPodder so these MP3s could hitch a ride on an iPod. That was the birth of podcasting: radio programming whenever and wherever you want it…. Before podcasting only about 150 people a month bothered to download the audio files of Morning Stories, a show on Boston’s public station WGBH. After the station switched to podcasting in October? Eighty thousand” (230).

Though many people will probably protest the fact, it seems that Hollywood celebrity news coverage is still sexist. My favorite blog post of the past week was in Jezebel entitled “US Editor Claims Women Want Covers That Exploit Female Celebs.” It caught my eye because it brought up an issue that is not so talked about, but is completely relevant non-the-less. It talks about how magazines cover more stories of women celebrities messing up than men. It points out that this topic sells and so editors are more likely to post a story about a messed up Britney than a blockbuster hit womanpower movie. According to this article in most celeb mags men get congratulated for great years in film or whatever else with less coverage on their mess-ups than women. The point being that the celebrity world is still a bit sexist.
I must confess I often find interesting stories to do with less than perfect celebs. Often Hollywood actors are so immortal seeming that to read a story about them screwing up is refreshing. It reminds us that they are humans just like everyone else. Nevertheless, the media feeds us what they think we want to hear. If they just turned things around we mightn’t seem so desperate for a bad-girl story anymore.

go to http://jezebel.com/357683/us-editor-claims-women-want-covers-that-exploit-female-celebs

In Kline and Burnstein’s Blog! an interview with Ayelet Waldman told of how Waldman went from a novelist stay-at-home mom to a blog fanatic. She was sucked into the blogosphere and brought as far as to write a suicide note online because of fellow bloggers comments to stories about her before other bloggers, friends and her husband helped her out.
The severity of her story is no laughing matter, however the fact remains that Waldman was on medication for bipolar disorder. She had a new medication that made her feel suicidal so the severity of posting blogs online is not so much the problem as posting them while on faulty medication. This isn’t to say that blogs are completely harmless. In her interview Waldman commented on how she kept up contact with 400 other pregnant women across the country while she was pregnant. She shared thoughts and questions with these women whom she had never met face to face. Looking back she saw how foolhardy this was. I agree with her views now, but would not completely boycott blogs, simply reduce the time spent on them to perhaps a couple times per week. As a writer, Waldman wanted to use her thoughts to write books or simply to keep her ideas more private. She realized that spilling her heart out to thousands of bloggers she didn’t know was not what she wanted to do ever again. I applaud her for discovering this.

Monitoring where children go online is in my opinion a violation of the privacy and the point of being online. Today Facebook is larger than ever, but if parents started checking their children’s Facebook pages, then there would be nowhere for them to have an online social network. In Kline and Burnstein’s Book Blog!, it talks about the different forms of online communication in a case study by Emily Nussbaum called “My So-Called Blog.” it tells the stories of a handful of teens in 2004 who have online blogs and/or chat with friends online. The teens for the most part know where to draw the line, either by creating a completely false profile or just not revealing too much. This following quote by Nussbaum reflects how one boy masks his true identity by a false profile description.
On his online journal this boy describes himself as:
“I have depression, bad skin, weight problems, low self-esteem, few friends, and many more reasons why I am angry.” In fact this boy was a good-looking 15 year old who simply needed a place to spill any thought or concerns he had. As it turns out this boy made new friendships online and turned out feeling much better about himself.
I think that instead of monitoring where their children go online, parents should keep an honesty connection with their kids so that they know they can tell their parents anything that might be bothering them.