Let me first say that media are incredibly prevalent and unavoidable in our society, and have come to surround nearly everything that I do. As an eighteen-year-old college student living in the twenty-first century, media are something that can both nurture and, alternately, squeeze the life out of aspects of a young adult’s life. Because it is so present and so thoroughly affects everything I do, I'm having a hard time figuring out exactly where to start. That, and I literally have way too much to say and I'm probably going to end up going overboard and writing way more than necessary because I'm honestly and truly excited and intrigued about media.
(Image courtesy of ME. My iTouch keeps me up-to-date with the media when I'm not around a computer. Plus, I love Word Warp.)
So here we go. I'm just going to start writing and see where this takes me. To begin, first of all, I really want to talk about music. Music has a really monumental and, well, special role in my life. I genuinely love it. I myself write music, and actually have an acoustic project with one of my best friends. I write the lyrics, the music, play guitar, and then we harmonize together. Music has the ability to affect and even transform your emotions, make you feel a specific way, and really impact your life in some cases. I've gone through many, many phases when it comes to music. I, like most other girls of my generation, did have my boy band time. I'll always be a Backstreet Boys girl at heart, let's be honest here. In seventh grade I was Green Day's biggest fan, and I mean it. I own every single album and I used to be able to spew facts about the band's history and its members' entire life stories. Seeing them in concert was probably the highlight of my
middle school time. They really do put on a great show. And you know, as embarrassing as I was (seriously, I was a psycho), there will always be times when it just strikes my fancy to throw on Dookie. Their older albums are prime, and they represent a certain era of my life so their music will always have some sort of meaning to me (photo courtesy of kaweah.com). After Green Day came my "hardcore" phase. I went to shows nearly every weekend at this venue in downtown Nashua called Drifters, where all sorts of local bands played. We were a community, and the music brought us together. It was a pretty cool thing to be a part of something like that. Now, I have a lot more variety in my life. I think it's kind of ridiculous to limit yourself to one genre of music. I'm happy listening to The Beatles, who "invaded American pop charts in the 1960s" (Media and Culture, 89), any time of day, any day, all day, every week, forever. Throw on some Streetlight Manifesto and I'd be stoked to sing along. I have an extremely extensive mellow playlist that I use to sleep and do homework and just chill out. I blast Johnny Cash from time to time. I'm a Biggie fanatic. I really am all over the place. But right now, more than any other artist, Explosions in the Sky is what I'm all about. As a writer, lyrics and songwriting are really important to me when listening to music and I generally steer away from instrumental music. But with this band, it's different. They can somehow make you feel an emotion so strongly and purely without uttering a single word. They are the only band that has ever made music that has affected me so much emotionally that it moved me to tears. They can somehow make me feel so hopeful and hopeless at the same time; it's an unusual but powerful limbic experience. Their music helps me sleep, helps me calm down when I'm anxious, helps me focus on homework, and helps me feel something when I'm kind of emotionally lost.
Movies also play an incredibly important role in my life. I'm obsessed with movies, and Netflix did nothing but fuel the fire. Some of my favorite films include Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Into the Wild (photo courtesy of webwombat.com), Inception, Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Donnie Darko, Brick, Garden State, Pan's Labyrinth, District 9, Finding Forrester...honestly, my list goes on and on. I find movies powerful and inspiring, and a lot of the time just plain entertaining. Movies help me escape from stress and the real world, and they enable me to relax and focus on the lives of others in lieu of my own. "The movie is not only a supreme expression of mechanism, but paradoxically it offers as product the most magical of consumer commodities, namely dreams" (Media and Culture, 213). I watch a movie nearly every day. I am very critical of movies, especially film adaptations of my favorite books, but I have such an extensive list of favorites because I honestly just watch a lot of movies. Watching a new movie is a much better way of using my spare time compared to the alternate option of sitting on Facebook for hours on end, in my opinion (even though I do that too sometimes).Speaking of Facebook, the Internet may be the most present medium in my daily life. I use the World Wide Web for almost everything - homework, research, contact, blogging, social networking, movie and television watching, music, and more. On a daily basis, the main sites I use are Google, Facebook, my.champlain.edu (I obviously have to keep up with my school stuff and email), StumbleUpon, and Tumblr. Tumblr is a blog site that I use and seriously, it runs my life. I've been on Tumblr for over a year now - I actually had my first blogiversary there in September. I really like it because it even further simplifies blogging from the set up here on Blogger (though I've been blogging on here for quite a while, too. I had to make an account for my Journalism class back during my junior year). It conveniently and easily enables you to create specific types of posts - Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, and Video. It's blogging made easy, and I find it pretty cool that I have 90 people, some I know and some I don't, following what I post there. The Internet is a very personal thing. I, for one, post a lot of things about my daily life or personal feelings on my various blogs. My Facebook has a lot of my personal information on it. "The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology - is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life" (Media and Culture, 49). As far as my actual Internet source goes, I was using Safari for a while when I first got my Macbook. Before that, I was a big fan of Google Chrome and used that on my Desktop at home. When I had to download Firefox upon coming to school to use Angel, I become more accustomed to just using that automatically so I wouldn't have to have multiple browsers up and blah blah blah - it was just convenient. Recently, though (by recently, I mean just last night) I was introduced to a new Web browser called RockMelt. It uses integration to make surfing the Web even more convenient - I actually have a Facebook sidebar so I always know when I'm getting notifications, can use the chat function, and check up on everyone's updates without even having the tab for it up. It's actually a really cool browser and for someone who just started using it less than 24 hours ago, I REALLY like it.
Moving on from there and on to magazines. I haven't subscribed to any magazines in years, sad as it is. The last magazine I read was my Ultimate Music Guide on John Lennon that I went out and bought specifically for this class (though as a Beatles fanatic, I'm glad I did...it's a collector's item...come on) and before that I hadn't really sat down and actually read a magazine in months. I'm around them so much less frequently lately and it makes it more difficult to really be influenced by them. To be honest, that's not all that disappointing for me. A lot of magazines don't present a lot of substantial content, at least from my opinion. Magazine staffs wonder, "How do we keep this material fresh? How do we keep it relevant? How do we, you know, get the reader excited, keep ourselves excited?" (Media and Culture, 304). How about you give me some real articles, about real things every once in a while? When I'm at home, though, I'm around magazines a lot more. We have tons of them just lying around on the coffee table and in the magazine rack, so if I'm bored, I oftentimes pick one up and start browsing through it. I most frequently read Newsweek, which I find to actually be of substance and provide legitimate, interesting, and informative articles. Other than that, the only magazine I really take the time to read and look through from cover to cover is Entertainment Weekly (image courtesy of buzznet.com). As someone this interested with the media, it enables me to keep up-to-date on current (as well as upcoming) films, books, and music.Newspapers hold a lot more value for me than magazines. I've always just regarded them as having more integrity and I always feel like the writing has more...value, might be the right word. After all, "There's almost no media experience sweeter...than poring over a good newspaper. In the quiet morning, with a cup of coffee - so long as you haven't turned on the TV, listened to the radio, or checked in online - it's as comfortable and personal as information gets" (Media and Culture, 249). I don't really interact much with newspapers since coming to school, aside from occasionally picking up a paper in the Hub and flipping through it briefly. At home, though, I can't get up from breakfast until I've read all of the comics and my horoscope. Zits and Dilbert are probably my favorite comics that run in the local newspaper. We even own books for each of those comic strips at my house. My relationship with newspapers grew initially when I won an essay contest through my local paper and had an article written about me. From there, a staff member emailed me
recommending that I apply for an internship there. I did, and my relationship when newspapers grew even more when I earned that internship with my senior year. I was a student writer for the Nashua Telegraph (image courtesy of fsbo.com), and my articles ran every three weeks throughout the whole school year. I did it for the writing experience, but it definitely gave me a better appreciation for newspapers. While I wasn't exactly at an office working with the staff writing articles at a desk, I still gained a lot of experience with meeting deadlines and a better knowledge of how newspapers work. I like local papers a lot because they value what kids like me have to say. I also had a really interesting experience with newspapers lately. My mom went on an 18-day trip to Israel and Egypt in the beginning of November and she brought me back a copy of The Jerusalem Post. It has been incredibly interesting for me to read a paper, front to back, from an entirely different continent.
Books play a much more important role in my life the the other two forms of text media. I have loved books as long as I can remember - so much that my dream job would be writing them. Stories like The Lorax (image courtesy of whatwoulddaddo.com) were my favorites as a kid, and they still to this day resonate with me as truly brilliant works of literature. Books still mean a great deal to me and I'm constantly reading multiple books at a time. Right now, I'm caught up in rereading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the eight millionth time, as well as reading On The Road and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest. Nearly nothing beats curling up with a good book for me. I got a library card downtown within the first few weeks of coming here. I absolutely love going to the library and wandering through row after row of millions of books. I love everything about them - the smell, the feel, the experience.... I become so invested in the things that I read. I fall into the world of the book I'm reading so completely, and that's half the magic of literature. "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened...belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, the people and the places and how the weather was" (Media and Culture, 316). I firmly believe that the right words have the power to change someone, and even maybe change the world. And books? Books definitely can.Radio, oof. To be honest, I've never really been a big fan of radio, which "was to the printing press what the telephone had been to the letter: it allowed immediacy" (Media and Culture, 109). Now that XM and Sirius Radio are around, though, my opinion of it has improved, though. A lot of my distaste for radio stems from my general dislike for "mainstream" music, or at least most of the popular things played on Top 40-like stations. With XM and Sirius, though, there are a lot more specialized stations. When I drive my father's car at home and don't have my iPod to hook up, I might listen to 106.3 Frank FM, which is the oldies and classic rock station where I live. If nothing good is playing, though, I move on to the built-in XM radio where I can listen to alternative stations, acoustic stations, and grunge stations and get music I actually like. I'm pretty partial to the grunge station, myself. Nice limbic stimulation.
Finally, my relationship with television. When it comes to television, I'm not one to casually watch episodes of shows here or there. I commit. When I love a show, it means I've seen every episode and can pretty much reference what happens in any of them. It means a lot to me when I find a really good show because there's a lot of crap on the air these days now that reality shows are running rampant. "Reality programs deprive actors of work as they occupy larger parcels of prime-time real estate" (Media and Culture, 172). But I have found a select few shows that I really do love. These shows include That 70's Show, How I Met Your Mother, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and finally, my latest addiction, Dexter (image courtesy of Google Images). Before watching, I never really knew what the show was about, I just knew a lot of people I knew really loved it. Then my brother told me I should check it out because he'd recently gotten into it. My brother and I have really similar tastes in music, television, and the like so I trusted that if he enjoyed it, I'd probably really like it too. So I checked it out on Netflix, which hosts the first two seasons for instant online play. Holy crap. I was hooked instantly. The plot in itself is pretty brilliant - a blood spatter analyst for the Miami police that helps the Homicide department catch serial killers, while being an undercover serial killer himself? Come on, it's genius. And Michael C. Hall just acts the role incredibly. It's clever and dark and just an all-around awesome show. The suspenseful nature of the show excites my Reptilian brain Of course, I whipped through the first two seasons in their entirety over the span of a single weekend. And then, upon realizing I couldn't continue watching, I was pretty grief-stricken. It was my entire life for a whole weekend, what was I supposed to do? Watch it illegally online, of course. Since then, it's been an absolutely wonderful and time-consuming addiction in which I spend far too much of my spare time locating each and every episode on various Web sites and following the life of the witty and disturbed Dexter Morgan. Fantastic. Here's the opening theme, just because even that is brilliant and needs to be shared.So there it is, media and me. We have a pretty extensive relationship and while I enjoy it, I kind of resent it at the same time. Media truly consumes my life. Almost every single thing I do in my daily life revolves around some medium, whether it be music, movies, the Internet, magazines, newspapers, books, radio, or television. It kind of makes me want to go all Christopher McCandless on everyone's ass, like in Into the Wild, and just get away from society and the media and everything that goes with it. But the media are powerful, and in fact, incredibly useful. All of this? It's a part of life.
