Blogging: Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

From instructional purposes, blogging presents many strengths and weaknesses to teachers and societies to interact with each other. My own experience has been limited but I am more and more drawn to this medium, although I still don't read blogs for “news”.

On the positive side and from an organizational perspective blogs present another method to broadcast varied ideas that are not popular because of the hegemonic control of the ruling elite on media. Blogging presents a way for many who want to present the world with another set of eyes without the baggage.

Recently, I was asked to create a blog for a small bi-weekly Marxist newspaper with a paper circulation of about ten thousand papers each press run. This paper covers issue specific to the working class about the economy, the fights against racism and sexism and the creation of a better world through class struggle. The newspaper has kept up with the times with the proliferation of the internet by using it's website to reach a larger audience (note: however the website is bad need of upgrading and an information architect).

Since its birth the blog has expanded the readership of the newspaper because of the various ways you can tag and label articles. The blog is located at WORDPRESS and although I like Blogger a lot (especially for its intergration with Gmail) it has many advantages like looking at the statistics about user who frequent your blog and what articles are most popular by users. Another feature of Wordpress is that you can follow how your blog is being referred to by other bloggerss.

Blogging from this perspective can be very intstructional: it gives the voiceless (or in this case a small newspaper or political Party) a voice. Thus, subverting what some would call the Frierian model of teacher and students: the larger media corporations such as ABC NEWS, NBC NEWS, etc who represent the teacher of news and the masses as the students. Now because of blogging the masses can have a firm control how they are represented and express their views about events that they either experienced but or heard from other news sources.