The Wardman Wire

This is the third part of my guest post series on why I blog. In the first post I wrote about the role of age and life experience in developed political opinions, and in the second post I added knowledge, both specifically political and general, into the mix. In this post I am going to write more about why I, personally, blog.

Where to start? At the beginning, obviously. Why did I start blogging? My first experience of blogs was not long before I made my first post. I came across an article on political blogging on the BBC website, which sent me to Iain Dale’s Diary, Guido Fawkes, and ConservativeHome. I read them for a couple of weeks, commented a few times, and visited various other political blogs linked to by them. After reading these blogs, I then decided to start blogging myself, picking the pseudonym that I still use - ThunderDragon.

Why did I chose this particular name? I can’t really recall. I’d used it a couple of times online before, and it also has a link back to my days at school through a geography project on Bhutan – the land of the thunder dragon. At first, blogging wasn’t very easy. Hence the huge gaps between my early posts. But I soon caught the blogging bug, posting some days, then most days, then every day. And now I post several times a day.

Yet why did I really start? Because I felt that the media was not reflecting my opinions, that young people were – and still are – ignored by the political elites, and not taken into consideration. This lack of real consideration of what young people really felt, coupled with the oft-made claims that young people are disengaged from politics, really began to piss me off.

Until I discovered blogs, I had began to become disinterested in and bored of politics, but blogs revitalised my interest. Instead of being just a one-way “conversation”, it again became an actual debate, with more than one viewpoint able to be made. Instead of just being talked at, it was possible to talk back as well.

This is why I started blogging. It was a chance to say what I thought, and to be involved in the political debate. I could see that blogging was the future of political communication, it was easy to do – setting up my first blog took less than five minutes – and I wanted to be part of it. So I started blogging, and I haven’t looked back, and I have been blogging for more than a year now.

In my next post in this series, I will write about why I continue to blog.

ThunderDragon