I love media. I adore it. It saved my life and it was the reason my life needed to be saved. It is not clear to me anymore how I was consuming media multiple hours every single day without truly being aware of the fact that I was not doing nothing, but rather I was consuming and letting myself be consumed. I realized that, personally, I cannot live in this hyperreality. This world where media is overwhelmingly everywhere, influencing your thoughts, habits, literally everything around you; controlling you, entering your life without any restrictions and boundaries, … How should I, ME, survive without involuntarily being changed into something I consumed? And that´s when it clicked for me: I can´t. I do not wish to stop consuming media, it is my source of inspiration (looking at all my favorite social media artists), my source of happiness (everytime my sister facetimes me), my source of excitement (answering the cute tinder guy), my source of knowlegde (with literally every book I would wish to read being there waiting for me to download them), and so on. I could list an example for every emotion.

And then it clicked a second time: The personal solution to my problem was simple: There is no boundary between life and media anymore, so this leaves me with the freedom to create my own boundaries, exactly the way I want them to be. I can decide what I want to consume, what I want to be consumed by, which strange thoughts I want to turn into mine, who´s opinion I want to influence mine. And if I don´t like something it is as easy as to mute/unfollow/block them; delete an app; de-register in order to stop them from spamming my mail.

It was this realization, or maybe this decision to be complete selfish with the way I use my media, that made me love it. It´s such a simple concept, but it changed my whole relationship to media. Be aware of who you let yourself be influenced by, set your boundaries where you want them to be; if you only want to use Instagram for art inspiration, then do so and that´s it. You could even make a new account for every specific thing that interests you, letting the algorithms work for you and finding the most amazing posts according to your interest, which is a fascinating idea to me.

Student number 13131990