A Woman In Media

“Be careful what you post...what’s up on the internet stays there forever” is a sentence I was scarred with ever since I made a MySpace account in the 7th grade against the will of my mother who feared I’d be lured by a pedophile. 

I still live with what my mother told me, being careful not to reveal too much of my ever changing self online, though now the internet is my main form of media consumption despite its vastness which is an enigma to me. It’s probably the place where I communicate and contact with other people most frequently--checking twitter, updating my Facebook status--and most conveniently. Why would I go through the effort to call my friend and ask about what she had for breakfast when I could just see it on her Instagram? Since my hectic schedule does not allow me to come home in time to see a critically-acclaimed show, for example, I’ll see it on my internet-capable phone on the train ride to school. It is convenient and quick and I think especially the youth’s media consumption holds those words as a motto. For example, with which app can I speedily inform myself about beauty standards the media shovels down people’s throats at this point so subtly that my eyes glaze over it? But most unfortunate of “convenient and quick” motto: I do not get party invites from people my age in the mail anymore, as it’s all on Facebook and probably more cost efficient. Really, I use such social media to update myself on what my generation finds important and I use it to spread awareness on social issues that I find important. Many people complain that such social activism does nothing. Before police brutality against unarmed people of color was being discussed on the nightly news, it was brought attention by twitter users, including myself. How else can we reach out to our peers, in my case--the youth who frequent such sites? I found out about the protests this year related to such police shootings through Facebook events. Where else can people spread their voices so easily with less of a filter? This is the kind of media I seek to consume though other kinds filter through my realms of consumption. These other kinds, I critique constantly and will post my critiques actively. Maybe this comes from my feminist standards of being critical of what we are fed, especially by mainstream news outlets and advertisements--billboards that catch my eye as I cross an avenue. 

Because I am critical, I want to see art that I can be less critical of. Maybe if I created something that goes against the norm and standards of media creation, then it would eventually create a domino-effect on the mainstream creation that we cannot really avoid. So I also seek to create art that exposes ideas and explores concepts less discussed in popular media. I recently shot a documentary on polyamory--a topic barely touched upon and even misconstrued by Hollywood or mainstream news, for example. I fear that we leave out a lot of important ideas on uncovered topics because media essentially controls what many people will read and many buy into it. Oprah said it was a good book, so people will read it. I wonder if that’s laziness on the part of the consumer. 

That’s how I judge myself. Will I fact check every bit of information I see in media? Most likely never. But that’s not just laziness, that’s also because we constantly see a lot of information a day. Because we do consciously and even unconsciously, certainly some of it has affected my character. Media examples of very thin women in ads made me feel being an overweight child was wrong because it was not “normal.” Even stereotypical examples of “what a feminist looks like” on television have made me question if dying my hair blue was a subconscious form of rebellion against the patriarchy since it’s not a conventional standard of beauty. Even the word “feminist” was given so many negative connotations, i.e. “man-haters” that Time Magazine a very influential outlet placed the word on its list of words to ban, fueling much debate on the meaning and also sparking outrage among many people. http://time.com/3576870/worst-words-poll-2014/ It’s concerning to reflect on this and realize by letting media controlled images possibly filter through my brain as I questioned the word, I am essentially playing into what corporations want us to believe (to keep this capitalist machine called America running).