About Blogging By Teens
By Donovan Baldwin
These days, blogs are created by people of all ages and from all walks of life. When it comes to blogging, however, teen writers are truly on the cutting edge of the blogging movement.
Today's teenagers are the first generation of people to have grown up using the internet at every stage of their development. Therefore, many adolescents have a seemingly innate sense of how to use web technology to express their innermost thoughts and ideas.
While older writers often experience a kind of learning curve when they begin to blog, many young people find that using a word processor and simple blogging software seems a more natural and direct mode of communication than writing in a pen and ink diary ever could.
One reason why blogs have undergone a kind of explosion within the teen community and are growing by leaps and bounds is the fact that they can simultaneously provide a unique mixture of visibility and anonymity. A teenager can invite friends and peers to read his or her blog with a simple email, thereby winning attention or possibly even praise from those peers...or even from the adult community. There are, for example, several instances of teens starting political or other blogs which have gained national recognition within the adult community!
Of course, with this visibility usually comes the possibility of embarrassment, but the fact that it is possible to blog anonymously with an invented handle or nickname negates a lot of the potential for humiliation. Many a blogging teen lives in fear that a parent or guardian will discover his or her blog, but, by publishing under an alias a teenager can spill his or her secrets without fear of being traced.
However, teens are subject to pressures not fully understood, or remembered, by those of us who are adults. It was not too long ago that a young girl committed suicide as a result of the personal humiliation inflicted on her online by another girl's mother.
Still, outside the world of online blogging, teen writers often will find only very limited opportunities to be published.
Magazines and journals are often reticent to publish young writers who may not have as much credibility as older writers with a lot of experience and extensive credits to their names. This can discourage adolescents from writing or from seeking chances to publish their work. By blogging, young people can begin to gain a following of readers without first having to win the attention and support of an editor or publisher who may not be very interested in teenaged authors.
If nothing else, learning to express oneself with the written word is an invaluable learning event.
Between the fact that blogs provide young people with a chance to exercise their impressive technical aptitude, to gain visibility without compromising privacy, and the chance to build a readership for their writing without having to jump through the traditional hoops of the publishing industry, it is little wonder that are so many teenagers with blogs. For some teenagers, blogging will become a very social endeavor that allows them to meet people with similar interests from all over the world.
Many a blogging teen has discovered that having a weblog on the internet is a great way to explore self-expression and, often, to win positive feedback from new friends.
Any blog, even a teen blog, can be a means of blogging for cash. To learn more, take a look at Rob Benwell's book, Blogging to the Bank.
|
|
