MEdia

We are constantly surrounded by media influence in our every day lives, and with a special focus on social media. It is everywhere we go, and what was once something used by only the users of that forum, social mediums such as facebook, twitter, instagram, and just the essential use of the "hashtag" has spread to majority of businesses and companies which now use these forums as a means for marketing. Living in New York City, we are especially faced with all of this media influence. This city holds so much flavor and so much life, messages are being spit at us left and right. Go stand in Times Square and just take it all in for a moment. It is INTENSE! What is crazy to me is how many people these messages really do have their designated effect on. As a media student, and someone who has a studied and keen eye for these codes, I see as many as I can, and I definitely try to be critical of what is put out in the media world. Some annoy me, some amuse me, some are just plain stupid. I love the idea of a target audience, and I love to study where these companies choose to put their money, and what they find to be truly effective. I'm constantly critiquing commercials. I find SO MANY to be infuriatingly dumb or uncreative. With the money that they put into these advertisements, it shocks me that "THIS" is what they could come up with. As if they tried their very best, gave it their all, and this....is what the end result is. It amazes me, how media moves people. I feel blessed and lucky to be a media student. I feel I have something that the general public does not: an eye, a deeper understanding, a critic's point-of-view.

So, Me, Personally.
I am an avid social media user. I have a facebook account, a twitter account, an instagram account (guilty pleasure), a pinterest account, and now a newly added vimeo account. I try to be on most current social forums for several reasons.
Some are cognitive, and some are not as easily recognized.
Facebook has been something that I have been gradually phasing out of.
I find that its use to me is mostly for staying in contact with friends from afar, and really for the hundreds of picture albums that encase my earlier teen and 20 years.
The statuses of people's every day lives bore me mostly. It is the same things always being posted, and to be honest, I feel too busy to be "sitting on facebook all day."
If i am going to sit on a social media forum, it would probably be twitter or instagram. Instagram is so interesting to me because millions of people use it, and i believe that it has a prominent showcase of the way our generation thinks and functions.
The memes that take up a lot of my instagram feed are very relevant, and often very funny.

My focus on social mediums becomes sarcastic when I see social media taking a higher role in people's lives than the actual physical people in their lives.
The curse of the "Like": "You don't have to like me; I like me."
It is sad and scary to me how society bases everything on the number of "likes" that something posted receives. People think that "liking" something, which is essentially a CLICK, means more than it really does.
A post about a moving story involving race, cancer or another fatal illness, gender equality, and whether this story is in a positive spin or a negative spin, liking the story does not do anything for the actual subject matter at hand. I am critical of the like because I strongly believe that it does not define who we are as humans and as far as the human experience, it is a huge interruption.
Younger children are addicted to social media, and the focus that they give to the like ratio is ridiculous to me. The fact is that there is so much emphasis put on the "like" and that social status can be determined by how many likes something has. How has our society reached this point?

I'm not entirely sure, but I know I want to stay critical of this like movement.

Back to my participation in social media, I do try to be active on the forums, and if I am not regularly posting, you can bet that I am regularly checking. I like to think that I have a good sense of humor and I enjoy lots of different activities like majority of other social media users, and having my feed filled with photos of food and recipes I might want to try out, fashion trends I want to keep up with, and of course, professional horseback riders giving me everyday inspiration. I also follow the generation-inspired funny guys such as "@TheFatJewish" who post things that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes crude, but generally speaking have a real underlying sense of truth with a very strong dose of sarcasm.
I love the fact that this generation is so open about life and what goes on within the every day constraints of it. I appreciate that raw honesty.

Growing up I was an active kid. I rarely watched television. Even as a film and media major, I still do not own a television to this day. Any shows that I watch I use a computer for. I grew up a horseback rider, so my days were spent outside playing with giant animals rather than computer games or Saturday morning cartoons.
I am grateful for this lifestyle because it gives me a fresher view on media and how I fit in with it.
I almost feel like an undercover cop as far as Media goes.
I like to dive in, get in with the crowd, check out the scene, and then take a nice, deep, critical look at what I am experiencing.
I critique the media experience, because the experience that a person has with whatever subject is being presented is the whole point of the media's existence.

Consuming media is highly entertaining and fun to me. It provides a great way to stay relevant and to connect with others. We must always keep in mind that life is to be lived physically, however, and cannot be lived out through the means of a social forum.

I want to create media that has underlying meanings. I don't want to give it all away on the first date. I want people to have to look between the lines in the art I create and I want them to see something new each time they view. I want to create progressive narratives that challenge the norms. I want to be smart, cunning, and prove how language, spoken, silent or physical is the key to communication, and communication is the key to the human experience.

Media exists to move, and I move with media. Got to stay current, and got to stay critical.



Interesting how the camera (VISION, a way of SEEING) is something that has been used for so long and it is the idea of SEEING that is behind most media influence. Interesting take:

http://elitedaily.com/news/technology/instagram-generation-experiences-present-like-memory-video/749153/The Instagram Generation