My Relationship With Media

Media is all around us. From the ads we see on billboards and magazines (though to be fair no one still reads those) to the way we socialize online, everything is put through something of a media filter. Most of us don't even realize its there until we stop and think about it, for instance, I never touch Facebook and only rarely check Twitter, but that just means I'm exposed to alternative media, whether I realize it or not. Youtube is the main reason this post is being put up so late alongside my inability to get anything done on time, while I probably spend more time on Reddit browsing news articles and short stories than I'd care to admit. While I may not see magazine ads, I still see lots of them on websites and videos, and though I only watch news channels like CNN or Fox when one of my parents puts it on, I still read assorted articles, often from those networks specifically on the internet. The point of what I say here is that we are all surrounded in our everyday lives by media, whether we like or even know it.

But what exactly is media? Merriam-Webster defines it as "a medium of cultivation, conveyance, or expression"(https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/media). Now with a definition that loose, of course we are surrounded by media. Going by that, air is a form of media as it conveys sounds, and the ground is media since it helps cultivate crops. Now obviously if I'm to discuss media and how it affects people I have to draw the line somewhere, so in order for something to be discussed by me as media, it has to be some method of transmitting information to large numbers of people over long distances. With this definition freshly procured, I will now proceed to explain how my idea of "media" has affected my life.

So its the third paragraph and I'm finally getting to what this post was actually supposed to be about. Indeed, my exposure to news articles and their frequent long-windedness has likely inspired this, as well as the way media portrays our current political climate, with politicians spending far too much time dancing around simple questions. Furthermore, the addressing of my own off-topicness is evidence of the type of comedic media I've been exposed to, as somehow watching Deadpool lead me to believe that would be funny. Regardless, like most people, I'd like to think I'm not very susceptible to marketing. That it only works on "sheep" whatever those are, and that I, an intellectual, could never fall prey to it. But realistically, that isn't true. While I can't think off the top of my head of a product I saw an ad for and instantly tried to get, I've certainly wanted to get things I saw on TV, and whenever someone mentions using a certain good or service, I typically associate the ad with it.

Another large way the media has impacted me is by messing with my political views. Recently I've been trying to shrug off all the bias placed on me by partisan news outlets and communities to figure out what I really believe, but it hasn't believed me. There was a part off me that thought Ben Shapiro made a few good points before I stepped back and realize how much of a hypocrite he was. And I really thought Hillary Clinton would be a good president, as opposed to just the lesser of two evils back when both she and Trump were running in 2016. Even now I can't be certain that I haven't been somehow biased towards some view that I'll be embarrassed about in the future. But at the very least, I'm aware these biases exist, and that just about all news sources are biased in some way. Just imagine you have a media problem. The first step towards understanding how it has affected you is to acknowledge that it has.