It was only a few years ago when the thought of someone sitting behind a computer, constantly on the internet and fiddling with HTML, would be considered a bit ridiculous and geeky.
Nowadays it's the norm. Most high school and college students are extremely familiar with the processes of the world wide web. We at WWU cannot survive one quarter of courses without an understanding of blackboard and frequent access to the internet. They are a part of every day, if not every hour, of our lives. The generations who didn't grow up with computers (perhaps the prime example of the extreme growth of technology) have a harder time following and keeping up with all the intricacies involved in something as simple as blogging (simple to us, anyway).
Tumblr is not the only demonstration of our vast knowledge of technology; many blogging sites allow a great deal of personalization. Tumblr, myspace and livejournal give the user a great deal of freedom when it comes to designing the page(s). A user can design a blog in a short amount of time and reveal a lot about him or herself that way. Twitter and facebook are more restrictive; you can change profile photos and cover photos and backgrounds, but the template remains in place. With the latter sites, many users will want their blogs to look a certain way. They will scour the internet in search of templates (codes that dictate the presentation of a blog), and they can either take that template and use it as is, edit it and change anything from dimensions to colors, or learn from it and create an entirely new template.
In my own experience, I have learned quite a bit from the internet. I've been a part of the web for about eight years, and have since learned about graphic design and HTML. I only know the basics, but of what I know it all seems simple and similar to another language. I know this because if I were to right click this very blog and open the page source, I could understand a lot of the coding; my mother however would think I had stomped on my keyboard.
I ask this: Does personalization improve blog use? Is a self-designed blog such as tumblr more fun to use or does it have more appeal than facebook? Is it a good or bad thing that there are many like me who consider HTML another familiar language?
I think personalization does improve blog use because it lets people create and make their own unique page! A self-designed blog is good for people who want something simple, but not always good for people who like to be creative in making their blog. It's a good thing in my personal experience for HTML to be a familiar language because i work with HTML in a lot of my computer science classes. Technology isn't all bad, and computers have created many jobs like computer science majors who work on websites for big companies :)
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