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.



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