On Being Dragged Kicking & Screaming...

I was one of many in my class who were more than just a little bit reluctant to experiment with blogs and YouTubes.  It took me a while to even put my name on my blog.  Figuratively speaking, we were all dragged kicking, and not so silently screaming, into having a personal presence on the Internet beyond that of email and FaceBook.  I hate to have to admit this, but I need to give credit where credit is due.  My Community Social Work teacher was right about using the Internet to do community advocacy social work.

A lot of the concerns that I had had to do with not wanting to be so public in my writing.  It is not my kind of thing to do, yet I have found that I can be just as opinionated as the next person, with such a platform as a blog.  I also know now that, by and large, there is so much out there on the web now that one person's contribution can easily escape notice in an Internet that is astronomically vast.  Hence, why worry about being read and critiqued? What I have found is few people beyond my friends and family barely notice, and I recently discovered that I even have family who are too busy reading something else!  You know who you are, if you ever get to reading this...

Yet, I have stumbled into the real reason for doing this, and that is the Internet is a valuable tool for community activism, even on a small scale such as mine.  If not for the Community Social Work class assignments,  I would not have had any way to help a friend, and through the blogs and a video, to help her to help others.  In researching my information, I have become keenly aware of how much can be presented on the Internet that would never make it into the mainstream media.  An individual can say what a newspaper or television station would hesitate to publish because of advertising concerns.  I understand on a personal level now why a free Internet is vital to an exchange of information, at a time when schools of higher education are being downsized and the proper public relations spin is put on the news by governments and corporations. 

The semester is coming to an end, and this is the last of the ten blogs that I am required to do for my class.  However it felt like being thrown into the water in the deep end during this class, I did learn to keep my head above water and even make it to the side of the Internet pool.  I will be using this blog again.  It won't be that regular, but now and again I might have something that I consider worth the effort to say.  No one really needs to listen to me, but at least if I have something worth saying, in my personal opinion, then on the Internet, somewhere, somehow, someone may need that input and find it useful one day. 

 But DANG!  This has been a lot of work!