Focusing on audience and more updates
To be quite honest, I fell behind this week. I don't have a worthy excuse besides having two major events this weekend I was working at and performing in. I think I got a little spooked by the possibility of having to rethink my entire project after my meeting last week. I let that supposed sense of defeat get to me a little too much, I think, because I didn't update my Kanbanery, stick to an unschedule, or write the paper. Again, no excuse, that's just what happened.
Instead, I spent more time thinking about my audience and doing a little extra research into who exactly am I building this for. Here are a couple pictures of mind barfs, as I like to call them, of informal brainstorms I did.
My audience breakthrough was I'm creating something for my friends, my network. This is not as broad of an audience as I was initially looking at ("young people") and it is significantly smaller, but it does narrow the focus. My immediate network consists of:
Primarily educated millennials
Media and pop-culture savvy
Still in the midst of settling on their career and personal trajectories
Interested in comedy (and knowledgeable about it as a form of entertainment) whether as audience members or comedians themselves
To follow this up, I created another survey to gauge my network's voting habits. This is what I created:
So far, I only have 16 responses and am hoping for more to come in before drawing any conclusions. But it is interesting to read people's responses. The majority lean towards seeing voting as a civic duty, but many have indicated that their schedules and apathy do deter them from getting to the polls.
Making an informed decision is ranked highly across the board. On a scale of 0 to 10 (with 10 being very important), the average ranking of responses so far is 9.29. That right there is the validation I needed to continue to focus on the informational aspect of my project in addition to simply encouraging people to physically vote. The two cannot be mutually exclusive in the context of my project.
Celine and I also checked in with each other, as we usually do, on Tuesday evening. We chatted online about our approaches to starting the paper mainly. She gave me some good advice about revisiting my pre-thesis paper and identifying the relevant parts to build off of for this paper.
In terms of my paper, things are a little slow going. I have moved my outline and pre-thesis paper into this Google Doc and moving bits into the places where they'll fit.
My advisor, Chris Dawes, was an immense help by supplying me with a number of studies related to social influences on voter habits and the effects of text, email, and Facebook on mobilization efforts. I will need to drastically ramp up my writing game for this week, however.