Thursday, November 1, 2007

HW27: Riverbend

Riverbend. "Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from New York". Feminist Press, New york, New York. 2007.

This book ties into the ITW101 course because it helps show the importance of blogs in real-life situations. Baghdad Burning is written by a 24 year old women named Riverbend. She lives in Iraq and felt as though she wanted to stat a blog about the war and what it was like to live in Iraq now. She starts off in her first post by saying that she was hesitant to start o blog because she didn't think that anybody would care enough to read. But she was wrong about that because many people read her blog daily, as stated in the introduction. I think that with this blog and book, Riverbend is going to teach so many Americans the other side of the story. I feel like many people are close minded here and stereotype all Iraqis as bad terrorists. From reading the first two blog posts, I also believe that Riverbend is not a terrorist. She talks about how when she first started up her blog and said that she was from Iraq, most Americans did not believe her. They didn't believe that she could be from Iraq because she was writing in English, had Internet access, and she even knows how to use a computer. This makes me think that a lot of the book is going to try to give an understanding to readers that Iraqis and not incompetent and they do know how to do things. This second blog post showed that she will give information on the political situation that was set up within her "new government".
Riverbend seems as though she is going to provide us with much more information about the war and the after-war that we would never know unless we lived in Iraq. This is exciting to me because I know nothing about the situation in Iraq, and I think hearing it from an insider's point of view and hearing what the Iraqi people were put through would be the best way to learn. Not only will this be informative to our political life, but it will support the impact that blogs has on certain people and how helpful they can be to the writer and how informative it can be to the reader.

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