On Why "Awkward" Has It Wrong

I have a dirty little secret.  I watch MTV.  Specifically, I watch Girl Code and Awkward.  That's right: my media consumption is not limited to BBC News, CNN, the NY Times and Wall Street Journal, HBO, and the internet.  Shocking, I know.  MTV's Awkward endeavors to present the life of a socially-awkward American blogger in high school.

But MTV has it wrong.  Not that this really surprises me, since MTV also gets Skins, the people who go "down the shore," and a lot of other things wrong.  But as much as I love Awkward, it is in no way because it accurately portrays the life of a blogger.

The show treats blogging like a tell-all confessional diary on the internet.  And for some bloggers, this is probably the case -- especially if those bloggers are, say, 13, which I assume is the market MTV is shooting for with this show.  But for most bloggers late into high school and into college, the posts are typically less about which boy is fighting for your attention and more about how you see the world.

Do I post life updates on my blog?  Absolutely.  Because they help contextualize the things I have to say, and also because they make for useful excuses when I've been bad about regularly updating, not because I fool myself into thinking my readers actually care about my exam schedule.

People still keep diaries, and some people are silly enough to make their deepest, darkest secrets open to the internet viewing public.  But that's not what most awkward teenage/twenty-something bloggers are doing with their blogs.  They're trying to change minds, spread awareness of issues, comment on social change and new media, not complain about the fact that their ex and their current boyfriend are fighting over them.

Also, that's not even awkward.  But it does make for interesting television.

The fact remains, though, that when this is how bloggers are represented in traditional media (kind of like how the movie Hackers presents hackers, which is not at all like what hacking actually is or what hacktivists do), it delegitimizes the medium.  Most bloggers see themselves as the voices of new media, their work taking the place of traditional Op-Eds in a world where print media is dying out.  Positing the work of bloggers through the lens of a girl who uses the internet to work out her petty relationship problems takes away from the legitimacy of bloggers, teenage girls, and the internet generation.

Don't get me wrong, though -- I would pay good money for Tamara's wardrobe and vocabulary, and Jenna Hamilton's life is ceaselessly amusing.  Just don't confuse what she does with what most bloggers are trying to do.

Unapologetically yours,
Rachel Leigh

100!

Darlings, I do believe I promised you a 100th post extravaganza!

Well...I don't really have anything extravaganza-worthy to say.

So, we got our crack team of graphic designers to whip up a celebratory graphic for the occasion.

I'm thinking maybe we should fire our so-called "crack team of graphic designers."  That is an infuriating gif.  Off with their heads!

I came up with an awesome idea for a post today at work, and then I totally forgot to write it down and now I have no idea what I had intended to say in the first place.

Anyway, I never thought, two and a half years ago, that I would still be blogging today, let alone at the 100 post mark (and most of them actually quality posts and not just crap!  I know, I'm just as surprised as you are!)

Here's to many more years and many more posts to come.

Here's a better gif for you.

Yours, most sincerely and forever,
Rachel Leigh

On Words and Unfinished Projects

So a few months ago, I began a post that I never published.

It started a little something like this:

This topic leaves little room to snark, but I was thinking the other day and I got curious, started exploring this grand little series of tubes we call the internet, and found something.

It all began in class the other day:

The title of this post was "On Linguistic Universals" and what I had intended it to be about was the way certain words are nearly universal cognates. I had been thinking about "mom" and how nearly every language's word for mother, or at least its shortened version, is incredibly similar. Mom, ma, mama, mami, mutter, madre...

I started talking to my professor about it, and he mentioned that there's a very similar trend with pa/fa in reference to fathers in other languages. He also pointed out that these universal words are part of the proof generally used to support to idea of a universal grammar.

But the discussion of this idea is less important to this post than why that post never got published. I had been initially fascinated by the topic, but in trying to research my post, I ended up losing steam and so this idea for a post simply sat in limbo for months.

I am disappointed to say that I may never finish that post, but it lends itself to a problem I have always had with this blog. I often come up with an idea for a post and then abandon it before it reaches full development.

Hopefully, at some point, I will be able to go back and flesh out several of my aborted posts in the future, because some of them were actually pretty decent ideas that might help to legitimize my blogging a bit more.

Until then, though, I'll be stuck writing posts explaining why I don't write better posts.

That's kinda metablog-y.

Loving you,
Rachel Leigh

On Why Tumblr Has Ruined My Blogging

I love Tumblr and Facebook. That's not even a question. I am an addict of blogging sites, social networks, and internet phenomena. I don't know how to exist on the internet without deeply entangling myself in a web of internet interactions: message boards, Twitter, etc.

The problem with this addiction, though, is that it hinders my ability to produce original content. On tumblr, the ratio of my original posts to endless reblogs of other people's content is probably 1 in 50. On Facebook and Tumblr alike, when I go to vent, as I often do on here, the thoughts are often reduced to one to two sentence snippets of thoughts, rather than developed, lively writing as I hope people have come to associate with this blog.

And yet, those snippets and snapshots of my life and the small chances to reblog the things I've seen and post a thought I had seem to be enough to lead to a sort of catharsis that leaves me without the urge to write a several paragraph blog post.

I hope, my darling readers, that you haven't forgotten about me. Know that I haven't forgotten about you. I stopped multiple times to post on here, and found that I had forgotten how hard it is to share my perceptions of the world without that handy little "reblog" button.

Luckily, since I'm in college and have to turn out papers (and, oh, hey a blog for one of my classes) on a regular basis, I think I'm getting back into the swing of really fleshing out my thoughts and expanding on them. Even if it is just a large amount of pondering and pontification sometimes.

It's good to be back.

Still Tumbling, Facebook Stalking, and blogging,
Rachel Leigh