Blogs have become a social phenomenon; I remember the first time I wrote a blog was during my grade eight humanities class, I did not get a gist of what I was writing. The second time encountering with blogs is during my first year at UBC. And I can sense the importance of working with blogs because it serves various purposes for example, we write about our experience, share, and learn. For example, we are writing blogs for our Arts Studies class, and we are constantly engaging ourselves with our own blogs, our colleagues’ blogs, commenting and gaining knowledge from other people’s blogs that contain different views and perspectives. In addition, writing comments in blogs build social relationships and eventually a community of shared opinions. I could sense that blogs being personal yet connecting to a wider audience where we learn and share through other bloggers and from public comments.

A few days ago, I encountered a Ted Talk given by Mena Trott of the revolution of blogs. Her message to the audience is that blogging gives power to ordinary people and keep a record of who you were and writing about things that interest to them through telling personal stories. She gives a heartfelt example of a blogger who is in her last stages of cancer saying to Mena that blogging has been the best moments of her lives.

As for me, I spent the most time looking and reading blogs in the past few months at UBC than any other time of my life. For example, prior coming to Vancouver, I have looked at <a href=”https://blogs.ubc.ca/blogsquad/”>UBC blogsquad</a>, travelling blog, blogs about Vancouver, and blogs containing other various topics. Blogs have played a huge role in my decision-making process when I deciding which phone carrier to use in Vancouver. I have looked at blogs that give opinions about phone carriers such as Rogers, Bell and Telus. Looking at the blogger’s opinion and the comments made by the phone customers I was able to decide which to choose.

For Mena Trott, her blog is entirely on herself, she is the subject of the blog. She writes blogs because it keeps a life record of her and she points out that if her children or her grandchildren would want to know who she was, they could refer to her blog. From my personal experiences, blogging helps me to think in various dimensions and since someone else is going to read my blog I feel that I am playing a certain role in the society.

There are other kinds of blogs that give information or autobiographical just like Mena Trott’s, but a common ground is that they all relate to personal experiences. I can somehow able to connect to Miller and Shepherd’s blogging as social action.