When I went back and reread my blog posts from the course of the semester, I have to say I wasn’t very surprised about what I found. I knew already that I usually used the class readings as a jumping-off point from which to link the material to my own experiences or other forms of media, but I think that as the semester went on, I (hopefully) tried to make deeper connections and look more closely at the readings.
Regarding themes, there is definitely a recurring theme of the movies and TV shows I’m familiar with in my posts, such as The Walking Dead, The Sixth Sense, and The Umbrella Academy, but on the other hand, I don’t have much personal experience in how death and technology are related, so it makes sense that I would look to outside examples when writing my blog posts.
Something else I observed in my own writing was my tendency to try to end my posts with a larger question or generalized statement about the class’s topics, sometimes with an added moral element about the concepts of death and technology as well. For example, I noticed that in my most recent post about Chernobyl and dark tourism especially, I focused a lot on the ethics of memorials and touring sites of tragedy (like we had discussed in class regarding Yolocaust).
If I had to go back and revisit or revise my previous blog posts, I think I would try to talk more about the larger theoretical concepts of the class and tie my examples back to those rather than focusing so much on the specific details of the day’s readings.