Why I Heart My Media

I have lived in a dormitory since 9th grade. When I first entered the dormitory, my sister was in sixth grade. She was very young to recognize that her sister would not come home often in the future. Before that, we were sisters who always looked and acted like twins. However, in different environments, we have become dissimilar.

Two years later, when I became 11th grade, I could no longer have a pleasant conversation with my sister as before. There were almost no common topics between us. It was impossible to spend time together because both had to focus on their studies. At that time, I was scared that I could never laugh and chat with my sister again like this.

It was just a TV show that caught us again, who seemed to be moving away endlessly. That spring, there was an audition program that was very popular in Korea. Many trainees participated in the program, and my sister and I sincerely cheered for some of them. As I needed as many votes as possible, I looked for people around me watching the same program. At that moment, I accidentally found out that my sister was watching the same program. We talked about the same topic for a long time. I think the phone call I made in the dormitory that day was almost over two hours.

With that opportunity, I began to get closer to my younger sister little by little. My sister also went to dormitory high school; we couldn’t see each other for two months a year. But that fact didn’t matter at all. We consumed the same media and talked on the same platform. Even if either of them missed the time zone when the program aired, we could know the contents through replay or numerous clips. Physical distance was not a problem at all. The time difference could not be an obstacle to our conversation either. That’s one of the reasons why I had a crush on media.

I am currently in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and my sister is in Seoul, South Korea. But we are still close sisters. There is a distance between her and me that takes 11 hours of flight and a time difference of 7 hours. However, we can still laugh and chat on the same topic. One happiness brought by modern technology is that you can read, hear, and talk to the same content on the other side of the world.

student number: 13557793

When the question of how I love my media arose, I lagged in a google document for several minutes before I could even remotely organize my thoughts towards my relationship with it. My media terrifies me, calms me, informs me, gives me opportunities and worries me. Emotions that as the media become ubiquitous, become part of me and eliminate the opportunity of having a one sided opinion.

When I wake up, I check my phone. I love checking instagram, pinterest and immersing myself in my personalised ‘for you pages’ that fuel my love of fashion and photography. I love the opportunity of going on Whatsapp and calling my family or best friends, who have dispersed around the world, seeing them and hearing their voice through my device. When I’m having anxiety, I jump on an app in search of positive content or distraction. It helps. My media makes me happy. Media and working within it gives me career opportunities, something that’s not hard to love. Its impact fascinates me and having worked with several intriguing media personalities excites me. And as lovely as that may seem, my satisfaction with it frightens me.

I cannot be away from my mobile phone for more than a few minutes in fear that I’ll miss someone trying to contact me, or an important notification. It’s boring for me to cook if I dont have Netflix blasting in the background building a feel of coziness. I follow models on instagram and restrict my diet and google plastic surgery fitting for my ever growing media insecurities. I feel guilty when my boyfriend, friends or family point out my attachment with my phone, but anxious when they jokefully take it away. That scares me. I am no longer able to sit down and read a whole book a day in a nice spot, go on a date or even fight without the involvement or distraction of the media.

Thus concluding my perspectives, I don’t think I am able to ever answer the question why I love my media, because like a past love, I truly want to believe that I don’t. 

Student Number : 13028308

If we were to ask anyone the question, “What is love?” they would most likely all respond in a completely different way. Love could be things like attraction, romance, nostalgia, sorrow, or even hatred. These elements signify that love can be defined by how one feels, and there is truly no formal explanation for it. 

The same goes for if we ask someone, whether or not they love the media. This is because for instance, one of my most commonly used medium social media, allows us to connect with our loved ones far away. Likewise, this also means that we are connected to people we no longer want to stay in touch with, and to many we don’t even know. Whether we are aware or unaware of these relationships, what we can say is that we both love and despise the opportunities the media can bring us, and these feelings that arise are not fixed.  

What does this mean? I feel that this demonstrates how one’s attraction towards the media can perhaps leave one in that uncanny feeling. Just as how people can not define “love” in one way, I believe that these split views we associate with the media follow a similar matter. For this reason, I can not say that I love or hate the media because there is no better or worse or an emotion that can simply be placed on the left or right side of a spectrum. 

Nevertheless, what I can say is that being a media zombie myself, I do want to connect with people on a deeper level, not through devices, avatars, or icons but through non-physical and undefinable entities such as empathy, care, and love which is perhaps also shaped by the media.

Student ID: 13951696

I like media because it makes connecting to other people easy. I have family and friends spreaded all over the world and it is incredible how within a few seconds you can connect with one regarding the distance or time zones. 

My favourite thing about connecting to others through media is when you can share any experience through a screen with no restrictions of distance. I often Face-Time my family or friends and just act as they are present in the room, just digitally. For example when cooking dinner or walking outside in nature. It makes it so natural.  

We talk, share our daily lives and just enjoying each others digital presence. 

My grandmother who is over 80 years old often comments on how fantastic it is to connect with her family via videocalls. During the pandemic we could not visit her due restrictions and video calls were the only way we could actually see each other and keep connected. 

Additionally, media makes it so much easier to connect with complete strangers online. Just by having same sense of humour or shared interests you can easily make friends for life. As we all know Paris is often seen as the city of love, but I think people do not realise how many people move to The Netherlands because of founded love online.  There is an entire community of long distance friends and relationships that help each other to feel as present to their loved ones as possible. Many call while they watch the same tv-show or a video, game together etc. 

I cannot say that I love media in the same way that I cannot say that I love people. I love my family, film, my friends, and photography. I love the people who taught me how to live life to the fullest and the apps without which I probably could not live at all. Hell, I would even say that I love Saoirse Ronan. But my love for Saoirse Ronan does not guarantee my love for every human. And my love for Instagram does not guarantee my love for everything that constitutes as media. 

I believe that media, as a whole, has greatly benefited people. It has helped us learn more about our world, communicate better, and share our stories. But it has also caused a lot of pain and confusion. It is scarily easy to fall down a rabbithole of misinformation, carefully disguised as enlightenment. With the help of media, individuals with malintent have the power to shift the mindset of entire populations. Youtube, for example, pushes content towards viewers not based on truth but rather what people are more likely to click on. 

On the other hand, I am the person that I am based on the media that I have consumed, which has it’s pros and cons. My humour has been shaped by Twitter and my love for art by Instagram. Media gave me the opportunity to get to know the people in my life in Amsterdam whom I now can’t imagine my life without. If it weren’t for media, the person that I am today wouldn’t exist.

Media has its flaws but it also has created important contributions to the world. Media, like all people, is imperfect but always growing and improving. 

Student ID: 13925415

I love my media because it enables me to romanticize my life, to make me feel like even the dull or ugly moments of reality can become something beautiful.

Motivated fitness girls on TikTok turned making coffee or working out until you break sweat into something incredibly desirable, that one dude that gives college-essay recommendations turned taking out the trash into quiet moments of serenity, and my favourite movie (The Fall [2006]by Tarsem Singh) gets me excited beyond recognition about a future in filmmaking.

And while it’s important to not get consumed by or sucked into hustle-culture, it feels nice to sometimes not only just eat every kind of garbage that crosses my path but to dedicate time and energy to my meals because they fuel my body and largely decide how my day is going to unfold.

Since I’ve moved into my own apartment I even like cleaning. To me, it is far easier to romanticize my circumstances and daily tasks if I’m the only person I have to take care of. It’s like I get to form my own romanticized little world within me that is ruled by my media.

Whenever I lack motivation for something, I just spend some time watching somebody doing exactly what I should be doing (studying, cleaning, working out). By the time I’m finished, I´ve gotten so fed up about my own laziness (and, of course, motivated by the aesthetics because, that too, could be my life) that I immediately get to it.

I’ve started to write this assignment a few weeks ago. In my first draft I wrote:

“The aesthetics and dreams my media has sold to me can make me incredibly jealous, too.

Everytime I have to watch a recorded lecture, the jealousy for all the students who get to sit inside the auditorium, surrounded my their classmates, listening to the collective tapping of the keys or scribbling on the paper, having the ability to ask their questions directly to the lecturer without any screen separating them, sometimes threatens to overtake me.

For years, my favourite sitcom (How I Met Your Mother, in which the main protagonist is a professor) has constantly indoctrinated me with an aesthetic idea of university. I watch it when I am healthy, when I am sick, on my good days and on my bad, on my birthday, on vacation, and after unwrapping the presents on Christmas.

This show is of course not the only medium that have taught me the aesthetics of university; shows like Gossip Girl, Gilmore Girls or Ivy League Youtubers have heavily contributed to what I expected my experience to be like.

Hours on hours have I observed students meeting up to go to lectures together, complaining about their commute, getting lost on campus, going to the library afterwards, holding a hot to-go cup of tea in cold winters.

It’s like media sold me a certain life structure; you will move out and be able to design your own space, you will be able to work on the best version of yourself, and you will be able to sit in an auditorium in university, complaining about the commute, a hot cup of tea between your frozen fingers.

With some of it, media was right. Hopefully one day, media will be right about the rest, too.”

Now that the lectures can be held in person again, I look back on this rant with delight and realize that a few weeks later, I actually did get to meet up with my friends before, complain about the bad weather on my way and go study with them afterwards.

It’s funny how we always believe that media sell us lies when perhaps in reality, the tropes will prove to be true and have just not yet revealed themselves.

My relationship with media is messy, but I’m glad that it is. Maybe the disappointment about promises unfulfilled made my first “real” lecture that much more special.

Before classes started and my only source for assignments were my fellow classmates, I made the following meme:

I quickly came to realize that I was wrong in my initial assumption that this was not going to be too much work, as I did not even realize we had assignments before our course begun.

I really despised my media that day for not signalizing me earlier that I had readings to finish and recorded lectures to watch.

But now I get to be a stressed out twenties-something university student complaining about the workload, like in all those movies and shows.

And isn’t that something?

Student 14011034

Even though I crave to disconnect, when I am able to disconnect, I also crave connecting again. 

It is a saviour which helps me to take my mind off anxiety triggering things. 

It is a place which enables you to record how you have grown.

It is frightening because it has a lot of aspects that I cannot control which can control me.

It is a way to keep in touch with my friends and family, even if we are in different timezones, you feel like you are right next to them. 

It is a medium which I feel like I am missing out so many things without it. 

It helps me to find almost any type of information I need.

It has so many problems that doesn’t have a solution yet.

Thinking about it you question reality, yourself, your freedom, your originality…

Media is like a toxic ex: it serves you positive things which makes you bond to them even more but it has also many negative sides. You want to get rid of them when you were together but after your break up, you miss their presence.

Student ID:  13548999 

When it comes to media, I believe there is no way of distinguishing whether you truly appreciate or despise it. 

For example, I adore being able to communicate with others wherever they are, and whenever I want. However, you can sometimes find yourself prioritizing that online conversation rather than the in person one that’s right in front of your nose. Also, it is amazing to be able to watch any piece of media you want within seconds, yet sometimes you can’t stop yourself from doing so for hours and hours and it becomes almost draining. 

Media can be an infinite source of information, inspiration, fun and entertainment but it can also be a source of stress or overwhelmingness. 

There is a difference between being present within the media and finding yourself consumed by it. Finding the perfect balance is what’s important to me but I still have work to do to achieve that goal.

Student ID: 13688952