writing online in english
after finals have ended (i think there's a chance of me topping the whole seventh grade! if you just count finals and not midterms that is) i have a bunch of things i wanna write about, man i need to keep them in a list like how i have a list of things i wanna do after finals and what i wanna pack to my camp for winter vacation.
but even during finals prep, i feel like i've been writing a lot in english here. i wrote in english before, but there was a lot of posts not in english or code switching between english and other languages, and my posting schedule was... wait, my posting schedule wasn't that diffeent back then. oh right i feel like i'm writing more because i also write email responses. that means there's been a lot of interactivity lately in my blogging life. yeah i think that's gonna be the whole point of this post, interactivity online and how writing in english connects to interactivity.
i consider myself to be online since third grade, when i started going on youtube myself. i made my first social media account that i actually used (i had a facebook account, but that doesn't count because i barely had any idea what facebook was and my mom deleted facebook from my phone right away) in fifth grade, which was reddit. since then i've made more accounts and have been on different online spaces, from big ones like reddit, youtube, and tumblr to smaller ones like bearblog and lipu pona. (where's the fediverse and bluesky on this spectrum? i have experience doomscrolling both but not that much so idk abt the size of the community)
but the first time i wrote something myself online was in august 2025, when i started bearblog. it was a blog, therefore i could ramble about myself and not whatever people were previously discussing, and it didn't feel that weird to me because i love rambling on my jabnote and i could do the same on this blog. but then i also made the bold move of emailing another blogger. we exchanged emails several times, at first i was very anxious about what the blogger would think about my awkward email to the point i would wake up in my sleep, but i got used to it and at some point i could email people without painfully overthinking every word. and bearblog has this very helpful culture of exploring different blogs and emailing / writing response posts for posts that you have something to talk about. so now i frequently write blog posts, read others' posts, and respond to them.
apart from it being very fun, it has helped me in two ways. the first one overlaps significantly with having fun but it helps me explore different cultures and worldviews. for me, the most interesting pieces of writing are not technical or opinion posts but things that relate to the writer's life. at school i found myself writing this in my jabnote:
one's life may be extremely boring to oneself, after all it's what they live in, but to others their life is very interesting. i know this cuz whenever somebody blogs or posts about their life, i end up reading it over and over to spot all the subtle differences from my life. like this person just posted about going to a specialized high school in new york, come on give me 30 mins to compare it to a specialized high school in korea. it's really common for me to fixate on one person to learn about their life and values.
like recently i have been learning from mason about the school system in australia, apparently mason's high school has a point system similar to korea's 고교학점제 but it actually works and does not turn high school into hell school. also at least where he lives, ppl do not care about going to a prestigious university and do not pressure 4 year olds about that. i have many questions about how that works and i will ask him. (am i mentioning mason too much on this blog?)
there's also confidence and honesty. you know how i said at first i was incredibly anxious about how people would think about what i said? yeah. now i do that less, i do not suddenly think of it in class or during my sleep and overthink about every bad thing that could happen. instead, whenever i get something wrong i try to think that i learned something i said was not very good and that i should try something different next time.
but why specifically the language english though? there are also two reasons for this. the first one is that i have always been in the english internet and it is more familiar to me. when i was more sensitive to national trends i did visit the korean internet more often, but i always had one foot in the english internet. i think this was because i was familiar with english from early on in my life and happened to enjoy english media when i first found it, and i saw it as my identity and something that makes me more special than other kids. now i don't feel superior for being good at english or being on the english internet, but it has kinda stuck with me and things in english generally feel more familiar. the english language also feels more natural on the internet for me, maybe this is because most of the people i have discussed this with were familiar to english at a young age, but some of my friends and my brother agree on this. in korean we have 존댓말 (formal/polite speech) and 반말 (informal/impolite speech), 존댓말 seems too rigid and 반말 seems too rude on the internet. but somehow english on the internet is uhhh natural???
also, you can talk to a wide range of people using english. not in the sense of gaining more views, but that whoever reaches out to you might be anyone. they're not limited to korea like when i use korean, they're not limited to one of the very small group of tokiponists, though it would be incredibly interesting to interact online using toki pona. most toki pona stuff are on discord but sometimes i wish there was a good network of tokiponists with personal websites... wait sike pona! but that isn't very good for me cuz most people there don't have a lot of toki pona on their websites and when they do, they don't usually talk about a wide range of topics. (lipamanka has a food blog tho) and a lot of them aren't even still on the web. i guess lipu Lapo has a bunch of toki pona texts and is the closest thing i have to finding toki pona internet people. if i'm talking less about longer blog posts or personal websites, lipu pona and mastodon exists but i have doomscrolled on those before and i don't want to doomscroll. wait i could just be the change i want to make and write + interact more in toki pona.
that ended on a weird ramble about toki pona spaces but that's it i don't know how to end things!