In September, I made a joke on Instagram about wanting to start a lifestyle blog but my professor having other ideas.

At its conception, the goal for my writing was to explore the creation process and progress of popular social movements throughout recent history, and in generational context view their development through the lens of digital (heavily social) medias. For me, my subject choice was centered heavily around my experiences in Oxford, especially during an election year as the political climate across the South continued to change, in many cases, rapidly. As the semester progressed, my scope not so much widened as it did refocus. My writing, in tandem with the assigned projects, progressed beyond the inception of movements like Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and March For Our Lives and focused more on the challenges developing movements can and will face due to digital media. The largest takeaway was not heavily researched based, but instead showed how easily my weekly topics intertwined with those of my classmates. Reading their posts, I consistently found additional information that I hadn’t first considered as either an effect or a consequence, but upon second look, heavily shaped the way the movements I was writing about developed.

Originally booked as a replacement class for my major requirement, this class pushed me far beyond my expectations. In many scenarios, I was intimidated by the workload and the complexities of the projects that felt well out of my comfort zone. The result was my creation of meaningful work that I felt inherently connected to, and then pushing those ideas into different mediums and expanding upon them. As far as developing ideas, I have always been more of a conceptual person. Creatively, I love sitting and discussing ideas, however I rarely get past the early stages of development; I think much of this is due to my fear of failure, my tendency to feel inadequate if having to develop tangible products or create something through a medium I’m unfamiliar with.

That wasn’t an option this semester. With several projects that dealt with design or the building of something beyond the conceptual stages, the Google search bar and I became very well acquainted. The most enjoyable, and by all means most difficult project, this semester turned out to be the mobile application concept and development. I talked about it to friends and family in a near-constant manner, bouncing ideas off of one another, making notes along the way. Activ8 was deeply rooted in the development of the movements I was writing about, but required heavy research and looks into what was happening in real time not only in Oxford but in major cities across the U.S. The final product was something I felt was intensely personal, as well as being something useful for a new generation of a socially conscious online community. It is something I hope to continue working on and evolving, eventually into something tangible. 

The resulting portfolio looks nothing like I originally intended as I published my first post in late August. Instead, it is far beyond my first intentions, and in similar fashion to the platforms I was writing about, heavily influenced by the input of my peers. It definitely isn’t a lifestyle blog, but honestly, it might be better.