Pleasure Media versus Purpose Media

More recently, due to some of the classes I am taking, including fundamentals of media, I have had to separate my time on media up. I have to balance my time between the media I consume purely for pleasure, and that which I consume to pass my classes and stay up to date on what goes on in the world at large. This recent shift has not only brought me into a larger, more complicated, and very corrupt world, but it also brought my attention to something curious. I spent an average amount of time on media outlets, not really trying to sift through critically through the media garbage, but now that I want to look for real consequential information about things going on in the world, I find that there is an inordinate amount of things that are passed of as important breaking news, and is really nothing but media garbage polished up to look like journalism. For example, the other day I was online and came across an article porn being blocked on google along with information on Putin and Drone strikes and Isis. It hardly makes a global impact if some guy can post his porn in his blog, yet it is lobbed in there with the rest of the, important breaking news stories. I realized that I have to really be in two separate frames of mind when I am viewing pleasure media and purpose media. When I want to view purpose media i have to be very aware of the fact that I need to be really looking for the important news and not the dressed up fluff disguised as journalism.

News making News

It has recently occurred to me just how much the media is able to take news they have reported on and make it into whatever they want, allow me to explain. The incident that sparked this realization was the recent shooting of three muslims apparently over a parking space rather than a hate crime. Now there was a touch of scandal on the sites I visited over the fact that a lot of news stations were reluctant to pounce on this terrible incident. however that is not the issue i noticed recently, it has been obvious for a while that the media will pick and chose breaking news depending on the victim, bu thats a topic perhaps for another day. the phenomenon i noticed came when i saw a clip from insider edition, where rather than report on this tragic incident, they instead simply used it to have something to report on. that is to say, insider edition briefly mentioned the incident, then used the parking issue part of the story to segway into a segment on how to deal with finding a parking space. they completely overlooked the issue of the the murders. this media outlet simply took a piece of news and used only the parts they wanted to and added a considerable amount of their own material so they could both take credit for dressing the issue and they could avoid boring their viewers with a relevant important issue by adding some random segment about how to find a parking space. The insider edition took a piece of real news and made it into a simple parking issue that was fluffy enough to report on for their audience. So rather than fully report on a serious issue they changed the entire angle of the story simply to please their audience rather than objectively inform them. i of course recognise that insider edition has the objective of being the most respected news outlet on television but if they can do this, than who is to say other news outlets aren't doing it constantly, they most certainly are. the news should be never be fluffed up or manipulated to be less than it is, three muslim murders by a white man hardly looks like just a simple issue of parking, the news should never be changed to something it isn't. The news is about the truth of what happened not the truth of what people want to hear.

A day without media

It had not even occured to me from the very beginning of this assignment how much media has worked its way into my life. I didn't even really consider my ipod as "media".  I always thought media was just facebook and the news and those sorts of things. So right off the bat I learned something new about media's impact on me without me knowing. I think the hardest part of the assignment was trying o counter-act the reflex. I have been so accustomed to having my finger on the pulse of my regularly consumed media that I had to actively fight the reflex to whip out my phone or apple device. I even had the fight the reflex to go places on my computer rather than stay focused on writing. Even when I wasn't doing it myself I had to avoid listening to a T.V. in the union or not look at someone elses phone. The whole experience was actually kind of depressing. before I thought, "of course i'm not one of those media junkies, I can unplug whenever I want". However it was a lot harder than I anticipated and it showed me how much media I actually consume compared to what I thought I consumed. I do hope though that I can in the future, not necessarily regulate how much media I take in, but simply screen the type of media and the quality of media I take in. Overall this experience was very interesting to say the least,