Writing Differences

When looking at my experiences with the digital medium, I prefer my personal experiences to the ones in this class. Before this class, my involvement with the digital medium was in Tumblr, a pseudo-blog website, and my personal blog. Tumblr’s appearance shows mostly pictures, usually with captions of no more than 1-2 sentences, and some solo original text of one paragraph or so in length. These posts come from people you “follow.” Tumblr works as a unique way to express thoughts, opinions, or emotions very succinctly. Most of these posts are of fleeting thoughts or are used as a way to vent to an audience who chooses to be a part of your audience. This is different than the way we used the digital medium in class. Our assignment, the digital story, was a work of fiction; Tumblr consists of posts that are usually nonfiction. Our digital story required details that were necessary to the reader, while Tumblr posts rarely consider it necessary to explain everything, as the author is not writing to help the audience understand. Posts on our class story were related to one another and we could build on the work of our peers. This is similar to Tumblr because people have the option to add to or comment on posts by others and they often do.

My other experience in the digital medium is a personal blog. My posts are usually multiple paragraphs and sometimes one topic will extend over multiple posts. The writing is usually very extensive, even if a topic does not require extensiveness, and is in some kind of essay format. It does not have much of a theme; instead I write on whatever topics interest me on a given day. The posts are all nonfiction but they may be written about something that is fiction, such as a novel that sparked an idea. This experience has some similarities to the writing we did in this class, such as the detail that both go into. In class, the writing required lots of detail and the same applies to blog posts. However, the writing in class had a plot of sorts and told a story; my posts do not tell a story, but rather explain thoughts or ideas of mine. The digital story integrated outside sources into the story and used sources to write it. I do not use links or other ways of integrating sources unless directly referencing the idea I am writing about.

Tumblr and my personal blog are my preferred styles in the digital medium. The digital story, while interesting to write, was not as fun to write. I personally like reading fiction but not so much writing it. Tumblr, unlike a blog, requires little cognitive effort to engage in because thoughts are very short and to the point. My blog is a place I write when I have a lot to say and am in a thinking mood. A digital story like the one in class has integrated pieces that are much more, in my opinion, difficult to work with, when reading and writing it. I prefer the experiences I had outside of this class.