It's been a fun past five weeks here on this blog!
Here are some of my general takeaways that I learned and struggled with in this project:
- It can be tricky weaving political leadership topics into subjects that are intended to appeal to young teen girls...sometimes I felt like I was forcing core information rather than having it naturally flow.
- I wasn't sure whether young girls would be more interested in U.S. political leaders, per say, or those of other countries. I wanted to provide global perspective to link the travel theme to politics, but sometimes it seemed like we were blogging about things just a bit too far away from the daily lives of our audience, whether in terms of location or time period.
- I struggled with finding a balance between inspiring girls to get out there and travel and feel like they can do anything with potentially disempowering some girls who don't have the means to travel to such exotic locations. I tried to combat this issue by enforcing the message that you don't have to go far away to have great experiences, but I still fear that this topic could isolate girls or cater more to the upper middle class who are able to go to Mexico for spring break, for example.
- I wanted to inject my own personality and experiences into this blog, but sometimes I feared I was coming across as "that rich girl who gets to go everywhere." I didn't want to alienate readers by sharing experiences that not everyone can have, so as the term progressed I focused more on other people's travel experiences. At the same time, though, I think that this resulted in a loss of some of the personality on the blog that could make readers feel connected to the authors.
- To go along with the personality attraction (but not make the personality so much about the blogger) I thought about the possibility of making this more of a "Guess who went where?" type of feel so readers would be pulled in by seeing where Taylor Swift went for example, rather than just reading about a location. I think there is potential to be very successful by weaving in famous personalities which I tried to do in a couple of cases but could probably be done to a greater extent in future blogs.
- I learned that you have to be very careful to avoid controversial material! Even if something may seem innocuous, we have to remember that we are part of the "Dartmouth bubble" and that our culture is not representative of the nation at large. This was a good exercise in helping ground me with the general public and look at matters through a very discerning eye. I didn't want any law suits for a class project!
Overall I had a great time with this project and tried very hard to put myself back in my 13-15-year old mindset!
-Lindsay
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