My Relationship With Media

Media is something that in the lives of me and my peers is almost unavoidable. I interact with the media for the majority of the time that I spend awake in a day. From the time I wake up and check my phone for notifications that I missed while I was asleep to the time I go to bed and plug in my phone right next to me, moments after I check for notifications one last time. Since media is such a huge part of my life, the different types of media I interact with effect me in how I think, act, and feel. There are three main places I interact with media the most on a daily basis: Snapchat, Instagram, and VSCO. Snapchat is one of the forms of media I used the most in my everyday life. I am constantly sending pictures of myself and what I am doing back and forth with friends which had both a negative and positive impact on me. Negatively, constantly showing people what you’re doing or what you look like and seeing what other people who you respect are doing or look like can make you strive to be doing things similar to them. But, the app is a great way to keep in touch and communicate with people from your community to many places around the world. Snapchat also provides a page at the back of its site that gives condescend versions of news articles (either written reports or videos) both funny and serious that make keeping up with news very convenient which is important especially in the political drama occurring around the world at this time. Instagram is the second biggest form of media I interact with. Instagram is one of my favorite forms of media due to its concept of sharing images and information while communicating with the friends you choose to follow. Many businesses, influencers, and leaders are using this app, making information on the topics they support or don’t support more widely known and accessible to people just scrolling through the app which I think is very good to keep everyone in the loop. However, this app can easily have fake news circulating around since anyone can post nearly anything which can get dangerous with the huge amount of people using the app. The app is also largely focused on likes and follows in comparison to the user which for some people can have a negative impact on them as they feel they are competing for popularity or friends in a way just due to a number of people who view a post. VSCO is the final form of media I use the most and it is by far my favorite, the positive aspects of this app outweigh the negatives unlike the other two forms of media. VSCO is, like Instagram, an app to share photos with friends you choose to follow, but the concept of it is very different. Likes and followers are not displayed for all to see and people tend to be more open on their VSCO accounts for that reason. The pressure to be accepted and liked is felt much less on this app and it is more about expressing yourself and your life which is something I really appreciate. For all of those reasons you can see how media effects me in my everyday life, and there are so many more ways I interact with it, too. I think media is both a positive and negative thing and I genuinely believe that it is how we treat and view it that decides the effect it has over us and our lives.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Brandy Melville's Unattainable Figure

Image
Brandy Melville is a popular Swiss apparel brand aimed towards young women. They are one of my favorite brands to shop at and I have spent more money than I am proud of shopping on their website and in their stores. They are a brand that has a generally positive connotation in my mind, I think of their products being of a generally high quality, and their website and stores are very put together and sophisticated. Aside from all of those positive thing about the brand, though, I do have a big problem with the company's advertising. And I don’t mean the pop up ads they pay for other websites to display or the influencers that they send packages to to show off their new products, I mean the models they use to display their clothes. Brandy Melville tends to use a wide range of girls on their website to model their clothes and then they will have influencers or models send in pictures of themselves wearing Brandy Melville outfits to post and promote their Instagram page. Again,
Read more

MissRepresentation

Image
In the film, MissRepresentation , there were many parts that stood out to me, but only one that affected me the most. That part affected me the most was where the film talked about how when young boys see sexualized women or women being less than men in the media, it leads them to treat women that way in real life. While this was not something that I didn't already know, it is still something that hit me because of how much I experience it in my life. This is noy just something that people experience in stories or movies, it is something that affects real people every day. At a young age, from playing video games or watching movies where men abuse and sexualize women, boy will reciprocate those actions onto their female peers. On playgrounds you will see boys being physical to girls, their actions defended by adults by saying it just means that the boy “likes” the girl. But those defensive adults are just another reason that boys grow up continuing to be affected by the media.
Read more

Together We ... Olay

Image
I watch Youtube an almost unhealthy amount. I tend to watch it while I do homework or while I am procrastinating doing said homework, so I see a lot of advertisements each day. One ad that had recently caught my eye for a number of reasons is the new Olay skin care commercial featuring several empowered women. In the ad, Youtube star and activist Lily Singh is the narrator of the ad and throughout its entirety gives a small motivational speech telling women that they are not “too anything,” that instead they are just the right amount of whatever they want. Then, multiple other strong female influencers come on screen dancing, smiling, and being casual, showing off what they stand for (be it body positivity or their stereotype-breaking career). I would say that this ad appeals most to a need for affiliation and a need for autonomy. Although affiliation and autonomy are basically two opposites, they work together in this ad to make it impactful to its target audience: women. The
Read more