Fifteenth Bit of Media—My Own (I already very aptly named a post "Reflection," so I can't very well call this one the same thing, can I?!)

For a while now I’ve been posting my reactions to various forms of media on this blog. I’ve used the ideas we’ve discussed in class and those I came here with, and this combination has led me to think more deeply and critically about all the media I intake, not just that which I feel most strongly about.

Even if I were to abolish my beloved YouTube, I would still consume more than my fair share of media in my daily life. As a white, American, middle-class, teenage girl, I fall into a very well sought out group of consumers. I have the money to buy things and the recklessness to buy them with abandon. So I (or the group I am part of) am advertised to and written to and created to regularly.

In addition to advertising, I have the luxuries of an internet connection, multiple local libraries, and a television. And not only that. I have friends who absorb just as much—if not, more—media as I do, who spread it in their conversation, ideas, and humor. So media in my life is virtually unavoidable.

As I discussed in my first reflection, the media and the populace seem to have a symbiotic relationship, in which each affects the other and both help each other to grow. I am not exempt from this. I am a self-proclaimed YouTube addict, to the point where my identity as a Nerdfighter is stronger than my identity as a Jew or a Norwegian. The ideas I have found on the internet have combined with my previous understanding to form my current ideology and knowledge of the world.

And it’s not like this is new. All of my life has been shaped at least in part by the media around me. When I was in pre-school I felt pressured to like pink because that was the color girls were portrayed liking by all the media I had seen. And I’ve been a book addict since about third grade. While my worldview is changing based on the new media I find on the internet, at its core my understanding of the world is still mainly from books, and still reflects my early reactions to media.

So I think it’s fair to say media has impacted my life quite a bit. I just never realized it until I was forced to dissect that which has made me feel and think. When I finally took the time to analyze why it bugged me or frightened me or made me so happy, I was surprised by just how much it did so.

This in turn has made me notice my intake of media, even when I don’t necessarily want to put it on my blog. When I see a glittering generality or an appeal to the need for autonomy, I now know what’s going on. When I notice that a campaign focuses more on an idea rather than a product’s function or worth, I know why its creators decided to do it. I can even attempt to figure out who they are trying to market it to, and with which strategies.

These strategies continue to work on me. I still fall for advertising and am not yet sick of the extreme messages being hurled at me from all sides by the media that surround me. So my intake of media has barely changed over this project in terms of quantity or reaction. But the main difference I have seen is that I think about media more. I still may not be the most critical of thinkers in the world, but this analysis of media has made me a lot less gullible than I used to be, or at least aware of my gullibility. I only wish that all people my age, or even younger, had the opportunity to learn about media the way I have.

Too often I hear about people being misled by propaganda and forced lack of education in media, and especially with my newfound knowledge of how media work, I feel that this education is essential to making one’s way in the world while avoiding being controlled by others.

When one knows how they are being misled, one can stop that misleading. This blog has caused me to think about which elements of the media I intake are objective facts, and which play on my assumptions and emotions or cause me to project ideas onto the information provided. With the knowledge gained through this assignment, I can analyze the messages these media send me to see how much I should believe, and what is worth bothering to notice. 

I got enjoyment and education out of this blog. It allowed me to make connections between various parts of the critical thinking class, showing how value and reality assumptions tie in with faulty reasoning, argument fallacies, and marketing strategies to comprise most of the media we intake. And it allowed me to connect these strategies to myself, to see how they affected me personally as well as the general public. I thank Mr. Starace for assigning this project, and all of my classmates whose presentations and discussions in class and insights out of class have furthered my thinking on all of the topics I covered in this blog and more.