Why I heart my media

Since the name of this Blog is “why I heart my media” I will make my contribution about myself and my relationship with media.

I was born in 2001 so i fall in the category of digital natives, people who grew up in and around technologies like computers the Internet and later smartphones. I still remember how fascinated we were as children at the new Iphone that my Father was given by his office as a company phone. Now even though we had all this technology aroun us as children, our parents would try to keep me and my two younger sisters from watching a lot of television or spending too much time on the computer or god forbid, playing video games. So when the other kids at school would talk about a new game or television program I would rarely be able to join the conversation of course my childhood wasnt sad and boring, quite the opposite actually but this is about media after all. So for the first of my Life my relationship with media was lived throuh other people like my friends who would either tell me about what happened on TV or they would let me use their video game console whenever I visited them.

As I grew up I started to watch more television because i figured out how to do on my own and I know this might seem weird to some people, at least it did to my friends at the time but i took me quite a long time to figure out how to use the TV on my own I think i was ten or twelve years old when i figured it out. It was around the same time when was given my first phone by my parents and I remember being incredibly proud of it. It was also around this time that video games became really popular with the poeple that I spent most of my time with in school but I was sailing at the time and with sailing practice a few times a week and homework there was not a lot of time to play video games and of course i didnt have the hardware for it and for some reason the people in my school thought this was a good enough reason to bully me for, and so they did for over a year, this affected me so much that I couldnt focus on school anymore and my grades got too bad and I had to change school. And to some extend I feel like the bullying still affects the way i interact with people today, I guess in some weird twisted way you could say that this only happened because of media so the effect media had on my life is definitely profound.

But, and this is a big but most my relationship with media has been a very good one it is probably not a healthy one and we spend way too much time together, and like all relationships there are ups and downs like when i found out how most tech companies make money today, by selling our data. And when I found out what can be done by research firms or advertising firms or even governments with that data, or when I found out that filter bubbles existed I was shocked and disappointed, and I considered to not use social media anymore. But then I decided for myself that the adventages far outweigh the questionable morality and legaility of social media even though I believe that these companies like facebook and Google can not continue like this I will still use them and enjoy using them, because of all the great things media allow me to do I can communicate with my friends who live on the other side of the planet, I can listen to my favorite audiobooks, podcasts and music, I can read books, watch movies and tv shows. Without media I probably wouldnt study in amsterdam right now and i wouldnt have been able to write this blogpost or any blogpsot for that matter.

I will say with full confidence that I love my media and with anything I love I will try and make the media and especially the internet a better place.

Student ID: 13847767