Skip to main content

My Relationship with Media


Overall, I would characterize my relationship with most media as fairly surface-level. While I enjoy doing things like watching movies, listening to music, and playing video games, I do not typically try to analyze my experience to determine what caused the feelings I had. However, if I experience media that I have a particularly strong negative or positive reaction to, I usually try to determine what about it made me react so strongly. Furthermore, I do not usually try to leave my comfort zone very much with the media I consume. For example, a vast majority of the movies I watch are sci-fi, fantasy, or action-oriented, so I have a narrower stream of messages I get from them than someone who watches a wider variety of genres. Over the course of this media blog, I will try to learn to further break down the experiences I get from media, and to apply the things I am learning in Critical Thinking to my everyday life.
The vast majority of the media I consume is strictly for entertainment. While I may receive deeper messages from the movies I watch or the games I play, I do not actively try to seek them out. Instead, I focus on what I would personally find most enjoyable on a surface level when looking for new media to consume. Despite this, I try to stay at least somewhat informed on more "serious" media, like the news. I use the information I get from it to help inform the decisions I make about the world and people around me much more than I use information from more entertainment-based media.
Another facet to my relationship with media is the media I personally create. For instance, while I have slowed down somewhat recently, I used to write short stories in my spare time. Similarly to the media I enjoy consuming the most, my stories are generally written to entertain first and foremost, and do not have very many significant themes or messages. However, as my view of the world has evolved over time, I have tried to evolve the media I produce with it, and am currently trying to incorporate more meaningful messages and themes into my writing.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Avatar: The Danger of a Surface-Level Allegory

  When I first finished watching the movie Avatar , my first reaction was that while it was a good movie overall, I felt somewhat unsatisfied by it. It certainly excelled in some areas, like its visual effects, but at the end of the day, it did not resonate with me as much I expected it to. While I at first expected my cynical feelings toward it to decrease with time, I eventually figured out the real flaw I had subconsciously found in the movie. Avatar  is a movie that tries too hard to be an allegory for real-world issues without putting any thought or creativity into the way those issues were portrayed.   The overall message of Avatar  is that colonialism is harmful, and the symbolism throughout is nearly inescapable. For instance, the alien race being exploited for their resources takes clear inspiration from portrayals of Native Americans in both their design and overall ideology, and most of the villains' monologues sound like they are reading an excerpt from...
2 comments
Read more

How to Break the Cycle of Objectification in Advertising

  Before writing this article, I decided to try out an experiment. I planned on going through all my "recommended" articles on Google and counting how many I went through before I saw some sort of advertising objectifying women. Sadly, the results were even worse than I expected. The very first article I clicked on had explicit advertisements of women, despite the fact that the article had nothing to do with the ad in question and the fact that I always click "Not interested" and "Stop showing me this ad" whenever I come across this kind of ad on the Internet. Ultimately, no matter how hard someone tries to escape this type of objectification in media, it will always be prevalent in the modern era.   As addressed in the documentary Miss Representation , companies' objectification of women in advertising leads to both men and women treating women like objects and giving them impossibly high physical standards, increasing the already high amount of sexi...
2 comments
Read more

The Game Awards: How Companies' Advertising Diminishes Video Games as an Art Form

  The Game Awards (known as TGA for short) is an annual live awards show streamed over the Internet focusing on highlighting video games from the past year that excel in various categories. Similarly to other award shows like the Oscars, the companies being nominated typically take the show very seriously by investing a large amount of money into advertising at the event. However, unlike most award shows, the majority of the audience is not actually watching the show to see which games win rewards. Instead, most viewers care far more about exclusive trailers and reveals for upcoming games that are showcased for the first time.   Overall, the general consensus surrounding TGA 2019 (which was on Thursday, December 13) was that the show was disappointing for its lack of compelling new information about upcoming games.  The award winners themselves did not cause significant controversy, but the fanbase still viewed the event as a failure purely because they did not get as ma...
2 comments
Read more