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How Media Affects Me: ch. x-xiii

The more relevant forms of media to me can be found on or through the internet. Thus, its creation is of great importance to me. That being said, the intricate nature of its origins go over my head. Terms like “binary” and “BITNET” do not make much sense to me, even after having read the chapter on it. I do, however, have an interest in patterns. So, I am able to understand how the creation of Colossus lead to success in WWII (although my understanding of the fact is definitely accredited to Benedict Cumberbatch in the movie The Imitation Game). 

Following that track of thought, the logic behind progressive technology expanding the power of the internet and its reach, like home computers and mobile devices, makes sense. It was weird learning that social media began as a way to connect students, especially since that is our reality now that we are not able to meet in public spaces for the time being. It is also weird how young the concept of social media really is. When you grow up in it, it seems like something that has been around forever.  For my personal use and outlook on social media, feel free to check my previous post. 

The chapter about public relations really put into perspective the purpose of media. As if the point has not been hammered in enough, media was born from a need to communicate. With so much information being communicated, some force has to dilute and organize it. Ergo, forums of any kind must be regulated or monitored in some way. That is what public relations are to me. Again, with the advancement of technology comes overall progress. Faster reaction times, better and stronger communication, broader reach, etc. help consistently build public relations industries and make their services more valuable. The power that companies give PR firms allows them to manipulate stories. And while that can sometimes be beneficial for the consumer, it can also be a deceitful way to sell you back to an advertiser.

Most wars are for profit, so the idea that advertising became a titan wave of industrial prowess during WWI is not surprising to me. Advertising is rather exploitative in nature. For me, ads and endorsements are pretty effective. I can admit that online advertising is incredibly annoying. However, I do not exactly have a huge problem with it. I am not important enough to have data that matters so I do not feel as invaded as many others do. For example, I looked up mattresses once last week and since then, all my ads have been about bedding. But I do not mind because I still need a mattress and some of the ads have been very helpful. I do not think that people should have to sacrifice their privacy for convenience and assistance, but I cannot negate the benefits. 

I touched on the idea of communications and social sciences have commonalities in my first post. One of those similarities is the use of theories to group different hypotheses. The cultural theories make the most sense to me as it deals with society interacting with their media to shape itself. In other social science classes, I tend to side with Marxist logic. So I see the realistic implications of the cultural theories. But I do think that it is the most accurate way of looking at the relationship between media and consumers. 

[arringtongreene]

How Media Affects Me: My Social Media Use for A Day

The thought of tracking my daily social media use on an average day in my regular life is quite scary. Thus, my anxiety initially went through the roof at the thought of having to do it under self-isolation and mandated quarantine. However, I must remember that I am not special or unique; most people my age fill their time with pointless scrolling and superficial entertainment. So, in no particular order, these are the apps I use in a day. 

TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. It is used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. After waking up at around 11:00am, I spent roughly 3 hours on this app this morning. While the app provides many different genres of entertainment, I prefer to watch comedic videos and videos of people creating art. The latter are incredibly soothing and the former are almost always relatable in a unique way that other forms of media rarely get right. Like all apps, there are a plethora of conventionally attractive people baiting young audiences into providing them with a career in looking pretty (which, arguably, is a skill in an of itself). Seeing those people interact with the app is discouraging, but rest assured, the next video on my “For You” page will be a girl reenacting an annoying altercation with a customer and my hunger for humor will again be satiated. 

The next app that I peruse is Instagram. Instagram is an American photo and video-sharing social networking service owned by Facebook, Inc. It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and launched in October 2010. I spend about a total of 4.5 hours on this app (not consecutively). Between holding conversations in my DMs and scrolling through hashtags to keep up with a zoomed out version of the news, this app keeps my preoccupied whenever I get a random surge of boredom, which, nowadays, is often. Like Tik Tok, Instagram lets me access versions of comedy that are niche enough to grab my attention and quick enough to keep it. This app, more so than the others, is a breeding ground for people with geometrically impossible hourglass figures and dangerously sharp jawlines. And if their job is to make me feel like peeling off my skin and just starting over completely, their success rate is 100%. But, because Instagram is a little more intimate, I can also see pictures of my friends and keep up with their success and life events. 

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Of all the apps on my phone, this is undoubtedly the one that I use the least. I spend no more than an hour a day on this app (max). I keep it active for now so that, in the future, I’ll be able to use for wherever my career takes me. However, in the meantime, I use it to check in on what’s going on in the world outside fo small circles. There are more words than images, so the lack of visual stimulation might be the reason it fails to keep me entertained. 

Snapchat is a multimedia messaging app used globally, created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown, former students at Stanford University. If I do some rough math, I spend about 2-3 hours a day on the app (again, not consecutively) I do not post on this app, but it allows me to keep up with what people are doing. On Snapchat, I only add people I know. I can instantly see what's going on in their lives. On other apps, where posts are virtually permanent, people have to present the most polished or funniest or most creative version of themselves. Here, because the posts go away in 24hrs, people don't feel that same pressure. I still feel that pressure of course, ergo I have not posted in 2 years. Nevertheless, this app, no matter how battery-draining it may be, provides me a connection to my friends that does not require me to physically interact with them. 

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. While I’m not completely sure if this counts as a social media app, I use it the most. Again, it is not an app that I interact with by commenting or posting. However, I watch an immeasurable amount of videos on this app. I genuinely lost track of my time on it. I think Youtube creators are so successful because they deliver the core content that you could probably get elsewhere but gives the viewer a relationship with the creator so the experience is personal. 

Other than the yearly post on Instagram, I do not interact with any of my social media apps. I don't post often, I never comment on other people’s posts and content creators are lucky to receive a like or share from me. I guess, in this way, these public sharing platforms feel incredibly personal for me. My history contributes to how the algorithms curate my feed. That means that every time I open my phone, there’s an entire world, essentially designed for me, by me, and frankly, I’d like to keep it that way. 

[arringtongreene]

How Media Affects Me: ch. iii-v

Books are obviously still important as social media stars who dominate different platforms on the internet sill feel the need to publish some tangible collection of thoughts and ideas to validate themselves as established creators. 

But how often does the average person read? The textbook teaches that, over time, print media and entertainment became more accessible to the everyday man and were no longer just restricted to the rich and literate. But the aliterate become the focus of the conversation without considering other factors. I feel as though some of those stratification trends are still present and affect current readers. There are places for people looking to read that do not have the money to buy books themselves. However, poverty-ridden communities cannot afford to stock their libraries and schools with good and fresh reading material. Even then, transportation becomes an issue for those looking to get to a library. There is a similar problem with the idea of digitizing all print media. That concept implies that everyone has access to a screen that would allow them to read online. 

In terms of censorship, there definitely are wrong answers, but there are also multiple correct answers. We need ratings/warnings to protect readers and viewers that should not be introduced to certain content. For example, those suffering from PTSD from sexual assault have the right to be warned that a book contains a rather graphic scene of rape. Similarly, a student studying how women are portrayed in literature might be looking for a book containing exactly that kind of scene. Giving a reader the heads up about the content they’ll soon be encountering is not a problem. The issue presents itself when storytellers and their narratives (whether right/reasonable or otherwise) are silenced. Art should never be censored because doing so strips the piece of its authenticity. This rule should be applied to writing, news, music, film, and any other sharing medium. 

I am a Journalism major with a minor in Political Science. Thus, the newspaper industry and its current level of viability are of much interest to me. 

As someone who has had no choice but to notice the wave of young people being involved in social and political issues/movements, it's important to recognize and understand that we are not unique or original in our pursuit of being heard. Historically, there have been many times when younger generations have been invested in the state of affairs. The chapter on newspapers really opened my eyes to what newspapers were originally meant to do. Regardless of their target demographic, newspapers and the people putting them together were meant to be a commentary of sorts on political and major world events. While it has strayed from that a bit, nature is redundant and we see the sames patterns being repeated as time goes on. 

Older print media mirrors that of today in that yellow journalism still thrives, managing to captivate audiences around the world and distract them from important news. Again, putting terms to practices that we observe in our natural world helps us better understand what is happening and allows us to better combat it in the event that we need to. 

Magazines have never been a relevant form of media to me and honestly, after having read the chapter on them, they still aren’t. For me, they serve as a more digestible form of news blended with surface-level entertainment. And that goes for all magazines. Ironically, my dream job would be to serve as Chief Editor for a publication, preferably a magazine. This would assure that I don’t drown in the responsibility and pressure that accompanies reputable news sources. The element of visual aids is incredibly important when trying to sell a product (keeping in mind that ideas are products too), so I understand their pertinence to an extent. However, I don’t think I’d ever personally include them in a conversation about print media as a stand-alone subject because any and everything that makes them special can be found in another form of media.

[arringtongreene]

How Media Affects Me: ch. i-ii

In previous social science classes that I have taken, I’ve learned about culture in terms of tangible traditions, inherent religious practices, innate beliefs and experiences, et cetera. However, something that this course brought to my attention was the fact that media and communications is not only an aspect of culture but is an intentional mover in the process of creating and maintaining culture. The movies we watch, the music we listen to, the news we receive, and the like all directly influence or are directly influenced by culture. 

A helpful tool that I am using to better understand the aforementioned fact is conceptualizing media and communications as stories and their respective creators as storytellers. This metaphor is obviously applicable to fictional bodies of work that are considered forms of media. A movie is simply a story in motion; similarly, a song is a story put to music. However, when we apply this way of thinking towards forms of media based in truth like the events related through news channels or political reports relayed on the radio, it allows us to keep in mind the fact that everything is based in narrative. While the core facts of a story might be true (and sometimes even those are corrupt), different forms of media relay the story in different ways. 

I think its also kind of cool to put terms to practices. When I can see a link to a story on Twitter, a screenshot of a post of that same story on Instagram, and a reaction video for that same story on YouTube, my preferred mediums are converging.

This course has also stressed the importance of being media literate and understanding the powers that control what information we get and how we get it. If we understand mass communication as the process of creating shared meaning, we have to ask the question: who is doing the sharing and what kind of meaning are they trying to share? The loudest voice always wins, but that voice is often backed by million/billion-dollar industries. Learning that only 5 or 6 companies are dominating and production almost all of the media and content that we consume is a little scary because these monopolies have alarming implications for the future. And when the lizards in our screens eventually do take over the world, only those who truly understand how media business works - only they will be able to trace the devolution and cope accordingly. 

Personally, while I understand the negative effects of media practices like niche marketing or audience fragmentation, I believe that the good far outweighs any possible bad. As a black queer woman, representation for me and my peers has been either extremely limited/nonexistent or incredibly perverted. So, when creators dream up stories or report stories that pertain to me and my life, I feel seen and recognized, feelings that allow me to be comfortable and proud in all aspects of my life, thus strengthening and building my communities and enriching my culture. For example, when I saw Black Panther and got to witness a strong, powerful, black woman as a warrior protecting her homeland, I felt seen (as did many black women around the world). 

And when those stories are told right (both those based in truth and in fiction), it allows others to dip their toes into communities outside of their own and ultimately forces us to understand one another better.