Well, this blog post is going to be me writing about my relationship with media through media, which other people will be able to read through their own media. As I’m typing out the sentences on my keyboard, I just realized how weird it is that pressing certain buttons creates certain characters on my screen and make sense!
On a mundane October 4th evening, Facebook and its corresponding apps have been suffering a global outage for more than 4 hours, which weirdly gave me the inspiration to write about my medialove. As I take a moment to reflect on my equation with media, I realized that we share an extremely complex bond. It makes me feel different emotions whenever I use it, like feeling homesick and happy at the same time when I open my phone and see a message from my parents, or extremely mushy when I get a romantic text from my boyfriend, or even frightened and perplexed when I watch a horror movie or just a documentary about media, algorithms and just all that data collected going places. But I still love it. My media is there for me through it all.
When I first came to Amsterdam, I was scared, but as soon as I put on my earphones and let Google Maps lead me, I quickly found my way around the place. After completing two months here, I feel like I’m in the right place. Even though I’m miles from home, I’ve created my own home here. I can call my family when I miss them, and even cook with my mom over facetime.
After coming here, I noticed that the use of media here is much more intuitive and widespread as compared to what we had back in our home country. Some simple observations of the same I made here were that the bus, tram, or metro stations show you the estimated time of arrival of your transport, or how the lights beside the metro gate light up indicating the door you need to exit through, which is extremely helpful as the announcement for the same cannot be understood by non-Dutch speakers. What really took me a while to understand was how to cross the roads here! You press a button and then the wait for the walk sign to turn green and emit a loud ticking noise. That really was so weird and much safer! We just used to cross the road whenever we wanted back home.
If it were not for these seemingly normal media objects, I would’ve felt extremely lost and alone in this new place where I didn’t know anyone. So, I am extremely grateful for all the media in my life, and I am extremely grateful that I live in a day and age where I am privileged enough to be going through a pandemic with the presence of my media to keep me sane through it all. And as an ending to my post, here are two memes I would like to share with everyone (the first one is from the internet, an exact representation of my mind frame during the making of the meme below it).
13885952 – Aanya Soni
Why I Heart My Media 