A few days ago a friend asked me: “What’s all this fuss about blogging? It looks like you’re addicted to them.” Well… Welcome to my world people. As a journalism student, I have quickly learnt that if you don’t blog, you’re nothing. In our social network era of shared madness, if you wish to become a journalist you simply have to blog. Blogs are the only thing that us desperate journalism students can put on our CVs when we’re looking for our first work experience.
When you start blogging, you’re super excited. You think: “Here’s a little space for my opinion in the ocean of the Internet!”. Then you realise that the Internet really is an ocean, and that before someone important is going to land on your small beach of a blog you might as well die waiting, if it’s ever going to happen.
Week after week, post after post, you realise blogging about something gets more and more difficult. Blogging requires time, energy and a lot of creativity that, if you’re buried under essay deadlines, might flee from your extremely opinionated head. But it’s a vicious circle: if you stop blogging, then you’ve stopped working. And you have no future.
You know what’s worst about blogs? They are addictive. I am currently writing for seven blogs. SEVEN. I am stuck with a thousand ideas that couldn’t fit in a blog because, as everyone says, to be successful as a blogger you have to create a niche. This is just one of the unwritten rules of blogging, just like “you have to share it on Facebook and annoy as many people as possible” and “you’re not supposed to post pictures of you in your underwear on it.”
Blogs are cyber monsters that swallow your free time and occupy all your thoughts. Every time you visit a museum, or eat in a restaurant, or watch a film, if you’re a blogger you think: “I should write a post about this!.” So you can forget about enjoying your time away from blogs.
Despite all of this, blogging is fun and it does give you a small space to share your views. This space is one of the reasons for which you might consider the Internet a tool, instead of a threat to your employability. But blogs are like vampires. They suck all your energy away, but you still want to write on them, because you like to share.
After all, vampires are fashionable (admit it, your eyes just twinkled when you read the word “vampires”!) : we crave for something that sucks our energy away. I just hope that this will give me an acceptable job one day.
Picture from Atomic Reach