I’m sitting in the classroom for a module on the MA I am studying. As we go round the room, people are explaining their ideas for their blog for the Digital Cultures unit; a few are saying their blog will be about campaigning, raising awareness, LOL Cats, serious stuff and so on. What is really surprising is that a fair few have said they don’t really “get” the blogging thing, which is a bit of a mystery to me.

Thinking about it, I think the feeling of not understanding something new is quite a common theme but what I find a shame is when people put up a wall before they try something new. Hopefully all my classmates will see that blogging is what you make of it; you can wax lyrical about pets, write about our innermost feelings or keep your private life private and write about films or music. For those that do blog and love it, they become totally self-centred and anxious to get lots of hits on their blog about the perfect spider chutney/hate that look like toilet bowls, etc.

Maybe it’s a natural human thing to resist new technology, but when I think of it, I realise I blog because I enjoy communicating. It doesn’t matter to me that my communiques go unnoticed because the main interest is in keeping my creativity ticking.

If you’re interested, and I want you to know my recipe for the perfect jam smoothie is on the page I’m linking to, I write here about the history of my blog…which basically goes back to when I was a terribly bored teenager who had lots of stuff bubbling up in my brain as I was finishing off my A levels. At uni most of my creativity was absorbed within my studies, and I really started to write again in 2011 for a number of websites until I started this one up again.

Through the module at uni, Digital Cultures, I intend to explore a number of areas of blogging like making money out of it – looking with an angry eye at SEO blogs that exist JUST to exist and hijack people to websites, the people who write all the time with the most banal lists of what they do every day (mostly cake eating I suspect) and I am going to ban all social media from my life for a week which may kill me.

Anyway, here is a blogger who I’m sure most people know of – http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com