By Gloria Magallanes
Senior Staff Writer

When it comes to the word “blog,” there are people who automatically reject the idea of owning one and much less writing one.

Yet there is a large number of young people who are gaining more interest in creating and sharing their own personal blogs, as evidenced by a growing number of blog-formated forums in recent years. Blogs are being created for multiple, and new, purposes.

With the evolution of technology, it is normal to encounter people who embrace the idea of self-expression. If someone is interested in sharing their written work or ideas, they can almost be certain it will be read or “skimmed” by others online. Many blog sites give writers an opportunity to hashtag after every blog post and it allows other users with similar interests more opportunity to view it.

There are other tools to help share written work with more people. Most sites now have “share” or “reblog” buttons that make it easy to spread the word on people’s creations. Modern social media makes it easy for people to create and inspire. Whether they like to write or share their fashion sense, they can always rely on blog sites to give them that liberty.

Tumblr is one of those blogs. It’s a site that is not just for creators but also for followers.

“I look down the list of blogs and I follow whatever seems interesting,” CSUSM student, Yadira, said.

Yadira, amongst others, uses this social media site to learn more about what they are interested in, whether it be TV shows, cooking, fashion, science or poetry.

Some studies show that people in our generation have shorter attention spans due to the fact that we retain less when we read and this happens because of our skimming habits. Nicholas Carr speaks about this new habit in his book The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

“The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustain attention,” Carr said.

Yet blogs that focus on news, science and history etc. give everyone the ability to understand things they otherwise might not comprehend easily if they read it in an online article or newspaper. Though blogs may make such people more comfortable with reading information outside their comfort zones, blogs can contain information that is questionable because of a lack of being based on reliable evidence.

Those who rely on other people’s blogs to get information about news or fashion trends often don’t think twice about whether the posts are credible. They forget about the biases that often occur in these blog posts. A blogger can pretend to be an expert or journalist, without experience or a degree. To many people it is simply the truth, without question. People tend to follow what they like and therefore read what they are interested in. Sometimes confirmation bias, the act of looking for information that confirms previously held beliefs, is a related issue.