This week has been all about reflection for me.
It's really interesting, and I do believe that understanding the how's and why's is important. And though it may be boring to hear it over and over, it's really emphasizing that unless we completely strip ourselves of everything, we won't be able to avoid being influenced by media. Overall, I can't help but repeat that media is everywhere and is everything. I can talk about each blog, and describe why memes are really vital to the current pop culture (which unfortunately I never got around to, and maybe I'll do it on my own time.) and why people like certain people. Though, this is a conclusion, and I'd like to keep this short, I can't help but have more and more thoughts about what I enjoyed and disliked about this.
I get to learn all the different styles and techniques that will allow me to make decisions that benefit me, and not just touching my internal emotional responses and feelings. I learn why people do the things they do and what is trying to be talked about. But it is important to know why, and that's what I have gotten out of these blogs, and from class. Nor will knowing what Walmart and McDonald's are doing to make them seem more favorable to me at the moment, change what I do at those locations. Let's be honest? For me personally, I won't change my decision on buying from Apple, just because they're advertising regular features as extravagent. Because of that, the reason we should all know about this is to understand why things work the way they do. Media has been a crutch for me, and a way to take my mind off of things, but it has also been the crutch that disables me and pressures me into a different direction. Because of its significance in my life, I feel like changing them slightly would cause really unsettling events to occur that I don't find very good. On a surface level, it's the same: scrolling through my media feeds and just trying to kill time while also being drawn into the clutter of advertisement, etc. With advertisments, the technique really become prominent, and though I don't sit in front of my laptop, finding ads and analyzing them, every second, I do catch glimpse of the various techniques.īut despite being aware about it all, it doesn't really change my habits on how I consume media. It is really a big tutorial and the game itself. I hope it's not an overstatement when I say that everything is media.Īnd because of that statement, it really guides our lives, in what morals we form, what we believe in, and what we do and feel like doing. A really key consumption I've done is listening to music, as it is a very versatile and varied platform of media that anyone can enjoy, really. Reading a book, playing a game, scrolling through my Facebook and Instagram feeds-all of it is media that I consume on a daily basis. Regardless of where I am, and what I'm doing, it will have some loose connection to media. And personally, the daily dose of media I get everyday is really enourmous. Even this blog is a form of media that is tasked with deconstructing media. The common phrase amongst us high school critical thinkers is that "media is all around us." And that's true.