Genres Web Paper 4

I'm in UR Internetz, Revolutionizin' UR Genres

 

“How many telegrams did you send when you had to dictate them over the phone to a  

   Western Union operator? How many emails do you send now that you can clatter them      

I have always had a great passion for literature, progressing throughout my life from my childhood when I was captivated by picture books to my more matured love of reading that persists to this day. When I came to college and found myself faced with choosing a major, mylifelong love of books provided me with the obvious answer of an English major.  Unfortunately I found out too late that the major was not what I thought it would be.  I had imagined myself sprawled for daysat a time amidst heaps of novels, which, upon having read, I would dissect and debate in classes filled with my peer English majors.  I had pictured myself in classes filled with

Recently, a new genre has been receiving the attention of internet users: the weblog. Using blogs, we can filter out the facts of our offline world and develop a new online external identity. This paper will discuss the nature, use-value, and appeal of this online external identity, discuss the importance of the consistency of the external self-both online and offline, review the relevance of the unverified information in blogs, and talk about how anonymity affects the way we perceive our own identity. Additionally, I hope to shed some light on the blog as an emerging genre and talk about what the blog's worldwide success reveals about human nature and psychology (and vice versa).

 

The Blog

Louisa Amsterdam
English 209: Emerging Genres
Truth and the Self in the Writing of Self-Disclosure

I am a self-proclaimed convert. Not only did I come into college with a plan to avoid technology, but I also came supplied with an over active fear of computers and all the things that go along with them. In the eyes of academia I was the perfect student to continue the tradition of clinging to my ignorance of all things new, while memorizing dead languages I would probably never use once I received my diaploma. I lacked a facebook account and had a talent for avoiding communication through email, preferring instead to correspond with my high school friends the old-fashioned way, using paper and ink. This semester, two of my classes somehow found a way to change everything.