WHO DO I THINK I AM?

As an immigrant of age 6, I consumed media to assimilate. At age 21, I consume media to understand the culture I’ve assimilated to.

Throughout elementary school, I developed an American lexicon through TRL, learned to recognize traditional American family values through 7th Heaven, and assumed what I perceived to be the normal American childhood through Hey Arnold!.

In middle school, I felt an intense nostalgia for mass media events that I had not actually experienced. In retrospect, this was, without a doubt, almost entirely due to my consuming hours and hours of the VH1 series, I Love the 70s, I Love the 80s. However, at the time, my passion for ‘80s high school movies was inexplicable, and my love for The Breakfast Club, St. Elmo’s Fire, Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles, (and too many more, which I am thankful I can no longer recall) was fueled by the new ability to search every single actor and director on Google, IMDB, and Wikipedia, to find more links and connections to fuel the obsession.

Up until the end of middle school, I was an avid, uncritical (at least, in terms of gender, racial, and sexual constructs) consumer of mass media. But as I became a high school student, I was enthralled in the new idea of freedom, of having reached the age where I can stop watching others’ experiences and finally go and explore the world for my own. To add to this, by the start of high school, after having crashed my computer upwards of ten times from excessive music downloading, having lost three iPods, and even two Walkman’s after that, I decided to say fuck it to being an active consumer of music.

 During my hiatus from consuming media (to whatever extent that may even be possible) I continued to assimilate – but this time, it was not through a TV or computer screen, it was through volunteer trips of learning the history and continuing practices of institutionalized racism and sexism, and through frequent visits to my older friends attending Columbia University, observing the amplified "phoniness" that most people put on to impress others who are only attempting the same, the loneliness that comes with it, and in turn, the hours and hours spent on Facebook, Reddit, and a slew of other websites that most college students would be able to identify.

Soon enough, with the start of college, I too, found myself scrolling, endlessly, aimlessly, down the pages of the same websites. I have critically studied these websites in terms of what they mean for journalism, pop culture, and social activism, but I have had trouble voicing these opinions on social media. Along with the return to the computer screen, I’ve also been re-immersed in mass media when it comes to TV shows and movies. This consumption has been tinged with resentment and fatigue, as the supposed liberal media is still so, so, so far from eradicating itself from the white-hetero-male perspective.

In the mean time, I have made websites for school projects about food justice and interracial relationships, and have set designed, and helped to produce a student film, Was -- an adaption of a short story in William Faulkner’s Go Down Moses. I also enjoy producing media for my friends' personal consumptions in the form of elaborate birthday cards. 

I am hoping that one day, I will finally just shut up with the complaining, and use my resources to show my own vision, and produce the media that I would like -- or would have liked, as a learning child -- to consume.