Who Do You Think You Are?

I always think of me as a very unique individual. Although most of this self-awareness is true, it is until I have to write about my media consumption that I realize there is some part of this self-image that has been shaped by media. Thus, my uniqueness may be more ordinary than what I think.

Media has always played an important role in my life. Since I was a kid, I love video games, TV, music, magazines, newspapers, and cinema. So, media has been influencing me from an early age. For example, I have a vivid memory of the frustration I had as a kid after seeing Return of the Jedi. I remember seating in the living room of my mother’s house and being sad because my life wasn’t as that one in the movie. Nowadays, I consume even more media than I did as a kid. I watch TV on Netflex, Amazon, DVR, Youtube, Vevo, and more; I watch movies at the movie theater, DVDs, Roku, on my phone, among others; I listen to music on my iPod, Podcasts, Internet radio, etc; I read magazines and newspaper published online; I use Twitter and Instagram (those being my only social networking practices). In addition to this, I also pay attention to billboards on the street, subway, and any other advertisement that catches my attention. The massive amount of information, or media for that matter, that I process on a daily basis is overwhelming.

Of course, with this huge influx of information, I am not always able to filter all the messages, and thus some piece of mediated information sticks. This unprocessed information is influencing my life and pulling me in directions that feel more natural than prompted. Media has me watching my diet and exercising because models on TV, billboards, and movies look so athletic that my not-so-athletic physic feels not up to the standards for success. It is the same feeling with fashion and other goods. It is a constant quest for the attainment of something that media makes us realize we lack of. Every time we see a flyer, catalogue, commercial, billboard, etc, it is a reminder that we are not quite complete yet as we thought we were.

In addition to the above, as part of our common experience involving shared mass media, there is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, and other social networks that have become extensions of our egos. Today, we live in the century of egocentric societies. We have the need of posting content in order to let people know that we are worthy the “like”, and that we also have the power to approve people by “like” them. We are encouraged to put an incredible amount of information about ourselves in order to create content. This content creation, that is unwaged, is used then to create “magazines” of our private lives. These magazines turn into venues for profitable opportunity for those organizations while providing information to freely study our behaviors. Subsequently, they create more products that we didn’t know we needed until they tell us we do. This is why I don’t have a Facebook account. This is my way to critique one aspect of media.

Article: Facebook is Using You! By NYT 

On the other hand, digital media has made more information available that we might have not been able to access otherwise; it allows us to experiment with our own creativity, enrich pop-culture, or break through gatekeepers. With the invention of Internet, media is as good as it is bad. Internet changed the pipeline of centralized information, but it has also opened windows into our private life to organizations that wouldn’t have been able to access it elsewhere.