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Day Seven: Mixed Messages

While scrolling through my social media on day seven, or Monday, a lot of hockey posts were coming up in reflection of that weekend’s NHL activities. One of the articles that struck my attention was an article talking about a player named Evander Kane. Kane is a player who used to play for the Winnipeg Jets for half of the 2014-15 season but was traded to the Buffalo Sabers because he was having troubles getting along with the Jets and acting in a professional matter. It seems like this has not changed much because the article was talking about his recent behavior in Buffalo and how he did not show up to practice on Sunday because “he had more important shit to do.”. “Sunday morning is just such a bad time for me” says Evander. “I had to go grocery shopping along with tons of other shit. Also, my girlfriend was being such a bitch that day so I had to go out and grab her a birthday present”.” –Pucker News (Evander Kane quote)

This really made me think about how media can have such a fast impact on people’s reputations and self-image. This article sped around the Internet and was viewed by so many different people. Even though it was previously known that Evander Kane had a negative reputation, now it is even more visible. I find it quite fascinating how through mass, and social media, someone’s reputation can change so drastically, and so quick.

           See article here: http://puckernews.com/2015/10/19/report-evander-kane-misses-practice-with-severe-case-of-other-shit-to-do/

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Day Three: Here Comes Trudeau

On Thursday in particular, I spent a lot of time on all my different social media platforms. The trending topic would have had to be the 2015 Canadian Federal election. Everyone from my friends’ parents, my younger cousin, CUSA, and my friends were all tweeting and updating their status’ trying to get the younger population to go vote. I found this very interesting because it really opens your eyes as to how influential your peers can be, but also how fast one can get their message out and to such a large amount of people through social media and media in general.

There were many different types of posts that people were sharing. Whether it was a “I Just Voted” with a picture of a maple leaf retweet, a persuasive status trying to convince young voters to take 20 minutes and go to the polls, someone sharing their preferred candidates opinions, or even someone trying to convince someone else to not vote for the person they wanted to vote for, I was always finding myself passing political statements on the internet last week. The Internet in this case wasn’t just used as a positive influential tool. I found that there were just as many negative posts as there were positives. It seemed to me that even though people were trying to get their friends out to vote, if their friends didn’t vote for who they wanted, they would be offended and it would change from positive, influential status’ and tweets to passive aggressive tweets and status updates saying how people should not even bother going to the polls to vote if it wasn’t for the candidate they supported.

In my opinion, these negatives posts cancelled out the positivity of the initial posts trying to get people out to vote. These made people worried what people would think of them based on their political view. In the long run, this will only have a negative outcome. People won’t want to go vote next time because they know that some people will look down at them depending on who they vote for. In the short run social media can be viewed at having a pretty immediate positive impact, but in lots of cases, these positive impacts turn negative a bit further down the road.

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Day Six: A Generational Shift

While I spent a good amount of time at my fifty year old aunt’s house on the weekend, it made me notice how different generations tend to use and focus on different forms of media. While I was there, my eighty five year old grandmother came over and even though she can barely hear anything anymore we began talking about the Internet and how she is struggling, but slowly starting to learn how to use it. She had noticed that my aunt was constantly checking her emails for work, but that I was even worse. She asked me why I was so obsessed with the Internet and my phone. She just couldn’t wrap her head around the idea of how scrolling through my twitter feed was more interesting to me than watching the news or doing a crossword puzzle.

After an hour of patiently trying to teach her how to use her tablet we bought her for her birthday she said she was no longer interested in it and said “Philippe. I think my friends and I are just too old for the Internet.” She said how she thought her friends and herself have more fun playing bridge, and doing their morning crossword puzzles. She went on to explain how she thinks activities like these allowed people to actually interact with each other and to engage in a face to face conversation, not just a string of words put together on an LED screen. This really got my thinking about how I think social media and the Internet has shaped our generation as a whole into the people we are today

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Day Five: A Drowning World

On day five I was in Montreal visiting my aunt and my grandmother. That night we went to a movie starring Anne Hatahway and Robert De Niro titled The Intern. I hadn’t even seen the trailer before I went to go see it, but it turned out to be very interesting; not just due to the fact that it was a good movie, but due to the fact that I think the producers and the directors tried to make it very media based. The main character was a CEO of a company in Brooklyn that had recently taken off. Every time you saw her, she was either on her phone, iPad, MacBook, reviewing data charts, or staring at some other form of media. Her whole life revolved around media and she was getting to a point where she was so consumed by media she wasn’t paying attention to her family or friends anymore.

This made me think about how dependent we are as a society on media and keeping up with the most recent, hippest thing. I couldn’t imagine going a day without either listening to music, going on the Internet, watching a video, reading an article, or even texting someone. It really is quite scary how dependent and consumed we have become as a society on electronics and media. When someone brings this to your attention you might think that you aren’t that dependent on your phone, Internet, or anything of that sorts until you really take a step back and think about it. I could relate to this movie and it was in fact scary for me to think about.

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Day Two: Nonstop

Before taking this class I knew what the word media meant but I hadn’t really thought about what it really was. I had always thought that when someone referred to media, they were mainly talking about the news and platforms that could reach out to a huge group of people at once. Before learning the real definition, I had never thought much about my personal media use. After tracking my own usage for a couple days it has really been brought to my attention that I am ALWAYS using or looking at some sort of media.  

Before taking the time to actually track my media use, I would think that if I was in class I would only be taking notes and paying strict attention, but to my surprise, this was not the case. I am constantly on my phone, no matter what time of the day it is and what I am doing at that time. Looking back at my spreadsheet from day two, it was brought to my attention how social we think we are, but in reality, we really are pretty secluded as a generation. There is a not a time of the day where we aren’t trying to post on social media or catch up on the latest gossip just so we can have the sense of social acceptance among our peers.