What I learned.

Well, here I am at Blog #25 (down to the wire, this whole project is due in 62 minutes, but I made it nonetheless). Because I’ll never feel as though I accomplish anything without a conclusion to my work, I’m going to do a little synopsis of the major points of this project. I am living evidence that AP English will ruin your life; I feel like anything without a thesis and conclusion is illegible. Don’t take AP English.

Anyways, I’ve written for the past month-ish about how the opinions and habits of college students are affected by their media consumption. For the most part, I assumed that the majority of college students were liberal; I also assumed that most college students have a efficacy that is far below the normal population. After researching and writing, I still believe these points are true, but only to a certain extent. Looking at possible reasons for why a college student might be more liberal than the average citizen, my eyes were opened to aspects of college life that are exactly the opposite of what I predicted. Though teenagers are stereotyped as rebellious liberals, their disregard for the environment conflicts with most liberal ideology. College students aren’t as ignorant as I anticipated either; sure, there are the token individuals who will find out a woman is running for president a month after she is inaugurated (pray that our first female president has a normal laugh), but we really do care about current events. From the people I talked with, especially freshmen, this first semester was so turbulent with moving out and getting new freedoms that forming educated opinions wasn’t high on the list of priorities. I’d be interested to talk with a few freshmen again after the end of another semester, to see how more college experience affects them. Perhaps after getting a longer chance to settle in, they’d resume, or begin, new media habits to stay in the know.

If I could repeat this assignment, I’d like to think I would try to space out my entries more, but we both know that probably wouldn’t happen. Besides my obvious procrastination, I wish that I would’ve had a better media diet myself going into the project. Until I had to write these blogs, I read the newspaper only because I didn’t want to fail daily news quizzes in my journalism class. Now I’m at the point where I wake up and skim AZ Central and Huffington Post just so I have the gist of the news, and then I read the paper later in the day. Then throughout the day, I’ll poke around on a few blog pages and, before the strike, I’d catch The Daily Show/ Colbert Report on TV. If I had these habits three months ago, I think I would’ve gotten a lot more out of the assignment. These blogs have also given me a taste of writing out of obligation. Sure, I’ve always had to write essays and things for grades in school, but I’ve never had the opportunity to do this more creative type of writing for a school project. I know now that I don’t feel the same way about writing as a career, I don’t like it as much when it becomes a requirement. Yeah, I know honors projects aren’t a requirement, but I’ve always had trouble with defining the term “requirement.”

Thanks for reading. I’m newly addicted to iWeb, so I have a website in the works. I’ll keep you all posted.