joshuabrightwell

[joshuabrightwell]

Media: The relationship we cant swipe left on.

Do we really know the impacts of tv?

To start off my blog I thought I’d talk about something that I find quite interesting, which is how modern day TV has shaped the worlds cultures in many ways and has done so most of the time  without us even knowing it has, think about it, we watch our favourite show and movies as we enjoy them and they release endorphins, then we just go on with our days but the shows and movies have impacts without us even realising it.

For example, the Kardashian’s is an incredibly successful and profitable television show that I feel has had a large impact on fashion and makeup cultures, I may not be one to talk as this is coming from an outside perspective but…… I was sat watching the Kardashians with my mum the other day and she was saying things like “oh that colour looks so good on her” or “I love that dress” then in the following days  packages were turning up at the house with yes you guessed it right! dresses and various other “fashionable”  items so I decided to ask her “why”? her response which I found to be quite humorous was “I’m trying to stay intact with my younger self what’s the problem?” which got me thinking why did she buy those. Then after I thought for a while, I realised that she was being unknowingly influenced by the things she watches on television.

I found this interesting so I went to my girlfriend after remembering a previous convocation id had with her about makeup and asked her “why did you buy that foundation then?” she told me that it was because it looked like the blush that Kylie Jenner sells from her brand Kylie cosmetics, which then made me realise that the everyday person gets affected by things like TV without even realising it, including me! But I think that it’s an amusing and interesting thing that many people don’t realise and I’m here for it.

Why podcasts are the ultimate life hack!

Amazing. That’s my opinion on podcasts, they have become my secret weapon for day to day life, allowing me to get on with tasks while being entertained, whether that be walking the dog, driving my car or  commuting to university ill always have a  different podcast on educating me about the deep dark secrets of our universe, or making me chuckle on my commute and having everybody looking  at me frowning like how dare I laugh on the most soul destroying  place on earth, the tube!

Listening to podcasts is like drinking a knowledge smoothie. They are crammed with copious amounts of information but are served in an easy to mentally digest way. I find them so brilliant because instead of having to read a 600-page book on interesting facts about space or watching a documentary on the secrets of our universe or whatever, I can listen to a hour long episode that keeps me interested the whole time, which I can’t do when reading a book and you learn lots of information and fun facts ( did you know that ton 618 the biggest black hole that we have discovered in the visible universe has an estimated mass of 66 times the mass of our sun?) there’s a podcast for everything that you are interested in which is what I love.

They help to make boring tasks less boring, what I mean by that is no one likes travelling on the train for over an hour to get into London. Music helps but after a while I find that I tune the music out and just stare into space but when I’m listening to Joe Rogan and Shane Gillis (one of the funniest comedians in the USA) have a convocation while they are all drunk and high makes my commute much more bearable and almost enjoyable.

What I am getting at is yes, podcasts are a go to for me when commuting to London or doing any task that I can wear my headphones for. They bring a little bit of entertainment to something that would be incredibly boring otherwise. I don’t know how I’d live without them.

Social media is the best! But….

if you are anything like me, you most likely have a love hate relationship with social media. Social media is amazing, I mean where else am I going to see my friends posting about their day to day lives or keep up to date with what’s going on with the football, or just sit and scroll endlessly until I realise its 2 am. It’s the ultimate tool for being able to stay entertained, informed, and connected all from the comfort of my king size bed.

But let’s be real, I’m sure many of you can agree with me, social media isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, there is a downside to it. Firstly, is how much time it takes up, it’s like a time vortex! Ill open an app like Tik Tok or Instagram to check a notification ad then suddenly I realise it’s been over an hour, and I now know all about a influencers brand new sports car and that there is an island in Japan called Cat Island with thousands of cats living on it. Another thing that I find really aggravating is this comparison culture that is happening to apparently everyone else on the internet. Everyone I see is posting about how they have been to Dubai and drove buggies on the dunes or gone fine dining in Venice or gone up to the top chamber of the Egyptian pyramids. It makes it hard not to feel like my life’s a bit, well boring in comparison as all I do is eat meal deals from Tesco and sit on the tube most of the week.

There’s a whole new trend going on at the moment where everyone has to overshare with their life’s and what’s going on in it. For example, I was scrolling, and I saw a woman crying on a post on Tik Tok I listened to what she was trying to say and over the tears she explained the reason why she broke up with her boyfriend, well ex-boyfriend now but what im trying to say is there’s a strange pressure at the moment where everyone feels they most post everything they do and share their life experiences to be a influencer nowadays. Like I don’t need to know what you had for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s exhausting! But, for some reason I can’t stop using social media, it gives a really unique way to connect with others I don’t just mean friends I mean being able to know what is going on all over the world just by opening up an app so for that reason im not sure id want to give it up, plus I don’t want to become one of those people that bug you asking you how to do things on apps they don’t understand cause they don’t use them enough (my mum), so even if it means I have to put up with endlessly scrolling and having to listen to peoples day to day life story’s I don’t think I will stop using social media.

So overall yea, social media isn’t perfect at all but I still think that its with it. How else would I find out about that new burger place 10 minutes from my house?

My problem with modern day film production

I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve noticed lately that movies and TV shows just aren’t the same anymore, I just feel like we are in this drought of actual good content. Every time I start a new series or movie, I’m just left thinking why they couldn’t have done that better and what happened to the creativity, instead on new and compelling stories we are getting reboots of old sequels and small branches of series off of older successful movies and re-used story lines (that no one asked for). Every time I see new live action remake of a classic it’s just never the same like the Aladdin series, it just doesn’t give off the same vibe as the film and in my opinion its honestly worse, and the most recent one a new horror movie based off of Winnie the Pooh, yes you read that right Winnie the Pooh the bear I grew up knowing to be a kind gentle bear that ate honey is now a murderous tyrant in this new movie that goes around killing people. It just doesn’t make sense to me.

It’s feels like we are caught in this loop of content that isn’t of any good quality but is churned out to make money. It’s almost like studios have a secret competition going on to see who can have the most ridiculous plot lines “ok guys we are going to make a new Obi-wan Kenobi series with six episodes where we barley see obi wans arch nemesis Darth Vader and they only fight once” like who allowed that there should have been at least 2 or 3 or am I the only one that thinks that?

I don’t even want to talk about the over use of CGI it sometimes feels like I’m watching a cut scene from a call of duty war scene with the use of explosions and the overload of fire and death, I think sometimes things are over exaggerated in CGI for no reason like I was watching a movie the other day and the characters crashed a van into a wall, they got out and then the WHOLE van blew up and I was just sat there thinking surely people can’t believe this is what would happen if they saw it in real life, sometimes it feels like studious just overuse CGI to the point where the movie or series just feel like its too fake to take seriously another example is I was watching a series called for all mankind, it’s about the space race between the Soviets and the USA, anyway they were mining rock on the moon and the main actor picked up a rock and dropped it and it fell just like they were on earth but they pumped so much money into making the spaceships look real and I couldn’t help but think how did someone allow this to be signed off and put out to the public? it’s a space series where they forget there’s no gravity in space, I don’t get how they can get away with silly things like this nowadays.

I miss the good old days where movies and shows took risks and made new storylines and new plots, now it seems that there is a endless recycle of plots but now the plots of today are just reminding us from the first plot years previous, I could be being a bit harsh as everyone I watch movies and series with now doesn’t want to watch them with me as I’m always complaining but I just don’t think im the only one who has this feeling. Im a huge lover of movies and series I just feel like actual production is being replaced with studios trying to rake in as much money as they can. Am I wrong ?