My Thoughts on the Media

Overall, through focusing on each different aspect of the media in today's society, I was able to realize how prominent it is in today's culture. Before this assignment, I had not fully understood just how often the media shows up in our everyday lives. Media can come in the form of a radio station, a website, an advertisement, a magazine, or social networking sites, and each form has a specific way of informing us of the culture and information in today's world. Positives and negatives exist in the media, as I was able to see through this analyzation. News and magazines have the power of altering opinions of their audience and can have the tendency to change people's ideas about body image and beauty in a negative way.  However, almost instantly, we are able to be exposed to mass media and despite the negative aspects, the messages portrayed all depend on the way we perceive them. Personally, I love the accessibility we have to the latest news and culture of our society and I will continue to allow myself to be informed through the various sources with an open mind, as time goes on and our society continues to grow and change.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a form of media that I use every day, either to casually scroll through images or to spark creativity. I began using Pinterest in high school and used it as a form of entertainment, as it was a website I could go to quickly to scroll through visually appealing images that interested me. Now, however, I use it for multiple other reasons. Whenever I need inspiration for art, clothing, or baking, it is the source I use most often. Pinterest is a website where I can quickly search through images and find new recipes, which is extremely helpful in stimulating my creative side. However, Pinterest can also become a block in creating unique ideas and thoughts. Because Pinterest, and it's world of ideas can be so easily accessed, I forget the importance in creating my own ideas thoughts. Although my unique thoughts are occasionally suppressed by looking through the thousands of images and ideas on the website, the amount of inspirations I have gained from Pinterest far outweighs the problem of uniqueness of thought.

Advertising

Today I decided to pay attention to all the advertisements I saw in one day. What I noticed was a shocking amount of advertisements that interest the self. Our society has become extremely self consumed, a majority of advertisements focusing on how we can make ourselves better, prettier, or anything else our culture is telling us to be. Throughout the day I saw advertisements claiming that their product would make the public happy in some way. This becomes a major problem when society begins to consume themselves with the idea that having all these products, or being skinnier or prettier, would make them happy. Another problem that I noticed throughout the day was the amount of advertisements for food, specifically unhealthy food. Food advertisements are a major contribution to obesity in America as advertisements consistently claim that their products will make the consumer happier, which causes the public to want to go spend money on fast food or other unhealthy products. Overall, although advertising is a great expression of the creativity and culture of America, it leads our society to become overly self-focused and selfish.

Social Media

Social media today is decreasing the amount of face-to-face communication people have, and increasing the problem of an uninformed society in a world of information. Each day walking to class, people are looking down at their phones and scrolling through apps and sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. People begin to ignore the world around them, focusing solely on the screens in front of them. In the time before class, rather than talking to the peers around them, students check their social media and ignore the opportunity to engage in conversations with those around them. A second aspect I have noticed in everyday life is the amount people rely on social media as their main source of the news. Many times, before I even go to a news source such as USA Today, I find out about major world news through Facebook or Twitter. Every day I work on reading the news from more reliable news sources rather than from social media, as it presents a very biased and irregularly informed opinion. Through my observations I have learned to separate my social media from my daily source of news and to focus more on the people and world around me than the screens that are constantly in front of me.

Magazines

Today I received two "Teen Vogue" magazines in the mail and was flipping through them and reading each one, as it is not a magazine I read often. As I was reading through them, I noticed the amount of positive and negative ideas that they put into women's minds. In the positive sense, I finished reading the magazine with a sense of enjoyment and having caught up on the latest fashion trends and culture of our society. However, they also give women and young girls an extreme idea of what beauty is and how to achieve it. Women read these magazines and find a need for makeup and a need to be skinny in order to be beautiful. Personally, after reading through both "Teen Vogue" magazines, I felt immediate concern over the brands of clothes I owned and the type of makeup I used. I finished reading feeling like I needed to change in order for others to see me as beautiful. However, I have tried to work on reading these magazines with the knowledge that women of all looks and sizes are beautiful, and many magazines edit the models in their pictures to look differently than they appear in real life.

Radio

Today I turned on the radio for the first time in a couple of weeks. Because of all the different ways to listen and access music such as, iTunes, Pandora, Spotify and iTunes radio, I tend to forget about the radio and everything it contains. After listening, I had discovered new songs and artists and a new interest in specific genres, along with an update of the top hit music. As I was listening, I noticed the many different genres offered throughout the stations and the large amount of advertisements in each radio station. Whenever there were advertisements on one station, however, I tended to quickly switch to a station that wasn't playing advertisements. Because of this, I find it easier to plug in my Spotify or my iTunes library and listen freely without the interruption of advertisements and the freedom to choose which song I want to listen to at the time.