How am I Changing my View on Media

      My view on media changes constantly but it has changed more so in the time that I have been in Critical Thinking. The process of digging deep into today's media has truly assisted me in realizing how pointless it really is. The thoughts of companies who produce ads, for example, has given me a great insight on how worthless ads really are and now that I know that the companies intentions are to build a relationship with the consumer, I am greatly skeptical of any ads I see today. I am also trying to pull back from "screen" usage to break any bonds I may already have with ads that I am constantly shown. This is proving to be an extremely difficult task seeing as I need my phone for communication purposes and other school related scenarios. Ads are a big part in my life, big (in this case) meaning oppressive, intrusive, and downright annoying.

The Persuaders: Ads

      Advertisements have played an extreme role in the lives of all growing up in the 21st century. I would access the amount of advertising I see on a day to day basis as far too much. Anytime I am on my phone one of the first things I see when traveling to Instagram or YouTube are ads. These ads are often if not always tailored towards my own interests but they rarely do they intrigue me enough to watch until they have ended. Ads also bombard me outside of my phone through other technologies such as computers, television, billboards, and more. In my opinion, the level of advertisement in today's economy has been allowed to get more and more out of hand in the last 10-20 years. It has risen to a level where the average person views as many as 5,000 ads per day compared to 500 per day back in the 1970's. This idea that companies have to convert any "blank space" they can find into an advertisement is absurd. An ability to "opt out" of ads seen on smart phones and computers should be given and if it had existed before, the ads seen per day would most likely decrease by half of what it is today. One can only hope that companies will decrease their output of ads but that seems unlikely seeing as people are still persuaded by the trickery they seen on a screen.

The Waffle House Shooting: CNN vs. Washington Post

      Early this morning at about 3:30 am, Travis Reiking of Morton, Illinois, entered a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, and open fired on its occupants using an AR-15.  This attack left four dead and several others injured. The shooting stopped only because of the heroics of a customer who disarmed Reiking and told him to leave. Reiking left but not before shedding his coat. He fled in the nude eventually picking up a pair of black pants. He is location is currently unknown and police have asked anyone who sees him to call them.
      The Washington Post tended not to use "big" words to add a touch of drama to their report. Author Kristine Phillips tended to not add any emotion to her reporting and focused on all the facts (like a normal news source should). By ignoring the opportunity to utilize emotions to her advantage she has shown she is more interested in the story rather than the responses it receives. She does however relate this shooting to one that occurred in a church in the same area in September that left one woman dead and several others injured.
      At CNN author Holly Yan tends to use bigger, and more drastic sounding words to illustrate the true awfulness of this event. Alongside her usage of facts and simple statements, Yan utilizes words and phrases to draw emotions from her readers. For example, she says that he was "wielding" an   AR-15 while the Washington Post simply says carrying. The usage of the word "wielding" automatically reminds one of guns or objects used to hurt others. The word "carnage" is also thrown around quite a bit to really push that idea that horrors were seen in this shooting.

Me and Ms. Media: My Current Relationship with Media

    

    To asses my current relationship with media, in all its forms, I must look back to the beginning of my "media footprint" and see where I could have gone wrong. Media does control many moments of my day and I often find myself casually checking Instagram or Snapchat to see if people have reached out to me when in reality I can often speak drectly to them. The idea that we must have a prescence on social media to actually "exist" is rather obsurd and it is the main reason that my posts on Instagram and Snapchat are very infrequent. I tend only to post images or videos on Instagram if I feel it expresses my taste for adventure and my love for the outdoors.

    News, especially the last year or so, has been controling my perseption of the world as news tends to focus on the negatives. Since the Trump regime began there has been a major focus on negtive ocurances. Granted most of his actions have been negative and even slightly reckless. The usefulness of being allerted via iPhone on any new information is actually rather useful and I have found that I am tending to read physical newspapers and being drawn more towards online articles that tend to leave out certain aspects of events to deliver a more concise statement. 

    As our class has progressed, I have already noticed many occurances where forms of media seem to take over how I see the world and hopefull by the end of the school year I will have learned how to deal with these issues in a manner that requires the mindset of a critical thinker. I truly believe that I can go without social media platrforms such as Snapchat and Instagram for the rest of my life mainly because of my minimal legacy I have left on media. I chose to believe that social media should become obsolete but sadly this will most likely never happen due to the fact that the emerging purpose of having social media is to create an abstract identity that is different from your concreste one that people can not always see. Media allowes the cowards to be brave, the artist to express, and the world to be seen from a perspecting that is not your own.