It's A Blogged, Blogged World
Kevin McCormick needed help. He felt he did not know how to dress, and got flustered every time he shopped for clothes.
"I didn't have a sense of style," says the 22-year-old IT manager from Hoboken, N.J.
So, on Sept. 1, 2005, he posted pictures of his wardrobe on DressKevin.com, and asked 15 friends to vote on outfits and give suggestions for new duds. Less than a year later, his Web site attracts up to 15,000 visitors daily.
The attention has astounded Kevin, who says he believes his guests take the time to give advice because they genuinely want to help him.
Kevin's site is far from being the only interactive hot spot on the Web. Cyber networking spaces host millions of (mostly young) people: MySpace has 65 million users, Xanga 45 million, and Facebook 7.5 million. In these sites, average Joes and Janes are able to share news, ideas, and photos in their Web logs, which are online journals nicknamed "blogs."
Who's Boss of the Blogosphere?
There are nearly 36 million blogs on the Internet, and a new blog is created every second of every day, according to the blog search engine Technorati.
The mushrooming outlet for online self-expression has spawned numerous questions, including:
WebMD has some answers for these questions, provided by experts in psychology, psychiatry, and sociology. Of course, their opinions are only part of the picture. You, as a member of today's "netizens," are used to having much more say about the state of things, and may want to post your own ideas about the subject.
"We all want to be on the red carpet like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie," says Michael Brody, M.D., chair of the TV & Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He says today's Internet users are accustomed to being the celebrities and content of cyberspace. It's an attitude fueled by the popularization of average people in reality TV shows.
The Need to Blog
Ordinary people at the helm of blogs are one of the main reasons why they are so attractive to netizens.
"It's easy to latch on to certain characters if they're more like us," says Brody. He says identification is a particular draw for teenagers — a large population of bloggers — because they are still trying to establish their own personalities.
Many teens check out what their peers are saying online to figure out their own voice. They also try out various personas with different screen names and sites. It's all just part of the role-playing and risk-taking that is normally part of adolescence.
"Kids like to play at different identities," explains Kate Wachs, Ph.D., a Chicago-area psychologist, director of DrKate.com, and author of Relationships for Dummies. "For example, if you go away to camp in real life, you might be a little more extroverted to see how that works. If everyone responds well to you, then you might come back and try that in your real life."
There are other motivations for sharing personal thoughts, photos, and videos in cyberspace, and they tap into some basic human needs and idiosyncrasies. Blogs enable us to:
Dangers in the Blogosphere
As powerful as the blogosphere is, and as fulfilling it is to some of our needs, there are possible risks associated with it. Here are four:
"It depends upon what area in their life gets impacted," says Greenfield, noting that the hypnotic value of the computer screen also doesn't help with keeping track of the clock.
A Blogged World
The blogosphere has already changed society. It has altered the way we conduct business and how we socialize. It has encouraged some people to learn new skills such as typing, uploading, and multitasking with different screens. It has even transformed the way we experience life.
"If you go through experiences, you may think, 'I can blog this' ... or you go to a party and you realize this is going to make some nice photographs on Flickr (a photo-sharing site)," says Kidd, noting that the thoughts of putting words or images on sites become part of each person's life experience.
Yet the Internet is not any different from any other new medium in revolutionizing society. Kidd says every novel technology from the cotton gin to cars to TV has had transformative effects on our culture.
What's different about the Internet is the speed in which changes seem to occur. Now blogs may be in vogue, but in the next couple of years something else may be the rave.
"The dust hasn't settled on the Internet generation yet," says Brody. He suspects that blogs will be replaced by a "video game" type of medium in which audiences and celebrities are able to interact.
SOURCES: Kevin McCormick, operator of DressKevin.com. Facebook.com. MySpace.com. Newsweek: "The New Wisdom of the Web," April 2006. Wikipedia.org: "Xanga." Technorati.com: "State of the Blogosphere, April 2006. Michael Brody, MD, chair, TV & media committee, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Kate Wachs, Ph.D., psychologist, Chicago; director, DrKate.com; author, Relationships for Dummies. Stuart Fischoff, PhD, editor, Journal of Media; emeritus professor of media psychology for the California State University, Los Angeles. David Greenfield, Ph.D., director, Center for Internet Behaviors, West Hartford, Conn.; author, Virtual Addiction. Dustin Kidd, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Temple University, Philadelphia. U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention: "Highlights of the Youth Internet Safety Survey," March 2001. Perverted-Justice.com: "The PeeJ Guide: What Parents Can Do." DaneCook.com.
By Dulce Zamora
Reviewed by Louise Chang, M.D.
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