judge judy, myspace and writing

Today’s class discussion about myspace reminds me of an episode of Judge Judy that I saw last year. In this particular episode, an elderly woman was suing her son’s friend for “slandering” her on his myspace blog. Apparently, the mother had done something that came out as b****y to the young friend, so he vented his anger on his blog in which he used various curse words to describe her. Her son read the blog entry and told his mother about it and she ended up suing the friend who posted the entry.

Aside from being tremendously ridiculous, this case was humorous as well, we can really try to sue anyone for anything these days! On a heavier note, the case really made me think of the boundaries of privacy. Can we really have privacy, especially in the vast network of internet? Sure, we can set our blogs and space pages on private but as long as we are linked to another person, friends can always expose our pages to outsiders. Perhaps this issue of privacy working online was one of my biggest concerns about the format of the class at the beginning. I am a pretty timid and quiet person and am honestly very self conscious and insecure about my writing, thus the idea of twenty plus other students reading my essays unnerved me. During my first couple entries I wrote and rewrote my entries four to five times, or until I got lazy, before posting it; I normally don’t even reread my papers, I rely on spell check and friends to help me do the needed revisions. However, the online blog entries forces me to self correct and revise, and I am beginning to enjoy this newly develop habit. Additionally, I have developed an appreciation for critiques from others.Another aspect of the course design is that we can use images to illustrate our written ideas and thoughts without going through the hassles of having to do presentations.

This class has forced me to become more comfortable with comparing my work to another student's work and thereby has taught me to look for alternative writing styles. I believe that this is a skill that will be very useful in the future. Furthermore, writing blogs and reading other people's blog has made me realize that my audience don't all think alike, thus pushing me to be more careful and aware of my audiences when expressing my opinions through my writing. I really enjoyed the Keyword book, it has contributed new meanings to words which I thought i knew through and through. Before this class I did not know how to start a blog, least of all maintain one, you can be assured that I have learned more than this in the past six weeks.