my my media
I consume media for the majority of my waking hours.from the time I wake up and check my email to when I go to bed nursing my baby while reading my iPhone. The media I encounter is both chosen and unchosen. I see advertisements and signs in the outside world on billboards and bus shelters and passing buses and newspaper stands, and bring media into my house via the Internet and my phone and magazines and books and TV.
I am kind of a techno-geek. I download The Daily Show and The Colbert Report via torrent sites every day (although I don't always have time to watch them) and sometimes other stuff if “the scene”has put out anything new and interesting. I watch the stuff I download on my laptop at home or school or sometimes (if I have time to convert it) on my phone on the bus. Most of the time, I listen to music while I study at night or by myself (when I'm with the kids, I usually keep it off). I play around on the Internet when I'm bored or procrastinating (more often than I'd like) or doing research. I've been doing a lot of Internet research this semester because blogs are a focus of my senior paper.
This week the TV has been on in my house much more than usual. Ordinarily, I rarely watch it at all, but I tend to get a bit obsessive about the political process in election seasons, so I've been watching the primary coverage on CNN. I grew up in Washington DC where politics are our sports and entertainment and gossip and (for many) employment all rolled into one, and I never got over it. I miss living in DC. It's not socially acceptable to be like that here. My kids have also been watching it more than usual (they don't usually watch it either), because my daughter has been home sick and her brother follows her around and does whatever she does. I don't want to make a habit of that, because they stand a pretty good chance of inheriting attention problems as it is, and I don't want to make that worse.
I think that who I am and where I am in life reflects on the ways that I consume media in several ways. I have the privilege and money (or at least the willingness to take on credit card debt) to buy gadgets to consume media on and for Internet access. I see people who look like me represented on the things that I see and watch. I would like to believe that I am a critical thinker and that I don't believe everything I see (and I don't, particularly in the case of the majority of advertisements), but the sheer quantity of the media I happily consume does not differentiate me much from the average American. I don't think I'm as cool as I think I am.
Excerpts from my log:
Day 1:
9am: wake up, check email
10am: drive my daughter to school, pass 7 billboards and 10 bus shelter ads on the way
12pm: nurse my son on the computer
10pm: watch news on CNN
Day 2:
12pm: daughter home sick, she watches PBS kids while I read the newspaper online
10pm: study while listening to music
12am: nurse baby while reading news on iPhone