Bloggers: escaping an online identity crisis

My grandparents used to think 'blogger' was another word for criminal. They would see the word being frequently accompanied by tags like 'blasphemy', 'arrested' or 'murdered', with newspapers everywhere deeming blogs as tools for spreading propaganda. All this bad press about blogging can be very misleading to a person who has never heard of it before. But it is confusing not just for them. 

The public is now quite uncomfortable with using this term in a general sense because of the negative publicity surrounding it. We need to ask ourselves if it is justified that fear should be so closely associated with the collective blogger identity here in Bangladesh. 

"Blog" is the truncated expression for web log. Just think of it as a journal or a scrapbook which will never run out of pages for us to fill; all it takes is a click for the rest of the world to discover and look into it. Bearing that in mind, we can safely accept that each status, tweet or photo that we post on the web is essentially a blog, because blogging, at its core, is a way of expressing ourselves. 

Before the advent of social media, blogs were the central points of communication for people online. As more and more people started connecting over their shared interests, the bloggers' community flourished. Although blogs which discuss hot topics in politics and pop-culture are still more widely read, we can find entire blogs dedicated to things as seemingly mundane as oatmeal. 

We need to remember that blogs can be anything we want them to be, and that's possible only because they are channels of free speech. No topic is too bizarre; we will usually be able to find a blogger who is an expert in our field of interest, no matter how unconventional it is. 

Even if we do not immediately find a blog related to our interest, there is nothing stopping us from starting our own. If we think about it, we all have to depend on combined knowledge to get ahead in our lives. If anything, blogs are tools for progress; the misplaced apprehension currently presiding over blogging needs to be put to rest.

By Antara Islam