Why I Heart My Media

It’s a complicated story. Compare it to a destructive teenage love, the one you can’t get enough of but deep inside, you know it’s not good for you. 

This is how I would describe my relationship with the media. I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but then again, how can you not? 

Today, we are the media. We are our social media profiles, we judge and love each other upon the basis of media. Like, dislike, comment or share. That’s the language of our time. 

So, what makes it destructive? Could it be the fact that the off button is the hardest piece to find on any electronic device? The fact that I am addicted to Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest? Because I am addicted, and every time I try to delete the app for a few weeks as a “challenge” to see if I am capable of disorienting myself from the internet, it never lasts. Eventually, I give in, and redownload all of them, simply because the urge is too strong.

Why am I addicted then? Well, through my social media I feel connected and a part of something. I can talk to my family members, send memes and funny reels to friends, see inspirational content to help me stay motivated and on track in life. It is also my main source to receive news and stay updated on what is happening in the world today. This is all amazing, and that is why I do love it. I am never really under stimulated anymore because there is constantly something to look at on my phone. 

Media also helped us stay connected through the worst pandemic of our time and it even helped me graduate high school although the final year I only stepped foot on campus 2 times. 

Media helps us humans become more efficient. Everything goes faster and smoother today thanks to the media. 

But why is it destructive then, you may ask? I believe it might go too fast, and therefore we get lost in it. Problems like misinformation, mental health problems, corruption, and privacy violations are things that are out of our control, but affect us all daily. It is scary to think of this topic, but I think the solution to it is to talk about it. Nowadays we frequently learn more about the hidden truth of the media thanks to whistleblowers from companies like Facebook. 

As history has proven, power belongs to the people and since we usually are the product when talking about different media they have to listen to us if we demand change.

I am positive that we will find a solution that works for all parties. And we can change this destructive teenage love into a healthy long-lasting marriage.  

Linnea Zoe Wolgsjo, 13868950

The first time I remember of getting touch with media is watching animation on TV, and now I am sure it is definitely not the real first time, cause our generation has already be totally surrounded by media, especially online social media.

I love media just because I feel I am already become part of media, not media become part of me. Although there are plenty forms of media but for me, the most significant one is social media network. I am a Chinese, I think there may be some differences of the social media platform that we used. In china, people have to use VPN in order to use Ins, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, even Google. Therefore, we have our own social media platform system just like above ones. Instead of user from worldwide, the majority of user-base of our social media is Chinese people. (But we still can receive news, big events from international, we also love to watch international TV series and movies, even though there are some fragments are lost as they are considered to be “unhealthy””violent” etc.)

I still do not know whether a social media system is not such international is good thing or bad, on the one hand, we may lose culture diversity on those social media platform to some extent, on the another hand, our own culture will never be lost. I believe people are more easier to contact with, as almost all of us are live in China and probably we watch the same Chinese TV series that people from other countries are not(I guessed ahhhhh I think there are quiet very few international people watch Chinese TV series, Chinese is hard and I guess the the lack of subtitle is the biggest problem.) I just feel some people is very close with me even though I had never see them in the real world. We still know each other even more than reality friends do. That’s sound crazy in 20 years ago. Indeed, we connect with social media, it even allows us to have an online relationship with your love. Isn’t is another world? A world also allows connections and emotions and it enable us to get in touch with someone you can’t in the real world, it is just like a magic that let everyone can be heard.

Our social platforms are also become more international, just like TikTok, which is made by a Chinese company. And there also are many people use Ins in China even though connect VPN is troublesome ahhhhh. Media also make the world united, intimate and culture diversified.

There are endless things we can talk about media, maybe my paragraph is messy and themeless, but I love media! It is what construct my fabulous life!

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Media makes me feel human. It makes me feel connected to other humans on the planet, be it complete strangers or the closest of friends.

I see a ridiculous TikTok video and I share a laugh with the thousands of other people who thought it was funny. I go to the cinema to see a movie and I feel the same emotions that the other filmgoers experienced. I stumble upon an online article about a problem I thought only I was experiencing – it gives me a sense of relief knowing that others are facing the same struggles. A friend who lives thousands of miles away posts something about their daily activities – I feel as if I still get to be a part of their life. I get to have a small moment of connection by just sending them an emoji as a response to their Instagram story.

Some people say that media is distancing us from our humanity, but I disagree. I think it adds a new layer of meaning and connection to our lives instead.

If used mindfully, of course…😉

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Do I love the media? It’s not like I had a choice really, our generation is born into a world that is made out of omni-present forms of media with new ones regularly appearing and easily finding its way to hungry content consumers. By perfecting the paper press humans have embarked on an exciting journey – a technological revolution of some sorts – trying to find out the most efficient and appealing way to spread information, communicate and influence others. I am not talking about love towards the media, I’m simply trying to say that I can’t imagine my own life without it.

My phone has become a cybernetic extension to my life. From the palm of my own hand I can access the broader knowledge that a hundred enciclopedias used to keep. I can reach out to anybody I know, anywhere, instantly. I can take out my 4k camera and capture my surroundings at any time, instantly sharing it with the word in any possible form I want. 

And all these things that sounded like science fiction years ago, today we take for granted. I cried to my family on my phone countless times during difficult moments, but the phone has also been here to capture my happiest. I couldn’t live in the Netherlands if I didn’t have it by my side. It is the one thing that keeps me connected to my homeland and to my family, and the non-stop online connection I have with them is making me feel like I am not alone here, on the other side of the continent.     

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As cheesy as it may sound, I can’t imagine my life without media, I know it sounds a bit ugh but yea, it’s true. I think I spend most of my time on media, from waking up and checking Instagram to listening to music the whole day to watching my favourite Netflix show at night, oh and of course getting uni things done…yea… Anyways jokes aside, media has definitely helped me in many ways such as listening to comforting music when I’m feeling down to watching some of my favourite Youtubers to keep my mind busy and away from all the bad things that are bringing me down. Through media, I get to connect with my closest friends whom I sadly don’t get to see that often, and of course face timing my parents pretty much every day. To hear them simply ask “have you eaten?” or “How was your day?” through the phone really makes my day 10 times better. So, a big thank you to media for letting me stay close to my family even when were so far apart. (and thank you for letting me listen to my best friend’s rants about her class mates on face time, which btw go on for hours)

Also, I would like to give a huge shout out to Google Maps for getting me places without me ending up on the other side of the world. Seriously, it has been a huge life saver, God knows where I would end up every day without Google Maps.

And as much as there are positives for using media, of course there are some down sides, for me, that is that it DISTRACTS ME every time I try to sit down and get some work done. Like I will start studying and if my phone makes a ting sound, that’s it, that’s where the work stops. But I mean jamming out to some of your favourite songs while studying is always nice, as a matter of fact, I am currently listening to my favourite playlist while I’m writing this post 😉

In short, I love my media because it keeps me close to the people I love most and because it lets me listen to my favourite artists every day!

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To be honest, media is my best friend. Media made me happy, made me cry, made me appreciate my family, friends, and myself. It might sound silly, but I am a better person just because I have a phone. What do I mean by that? The answer is simple – my phone helps me become someone I always wanted to be. The first thing I do when I wake up is check my phone. My smile is so wide when I see people reaching out to me or even sending me a cute picture. I feel sad if I see that something terrible happened. In other words, media and people who reach out using social media platforms have a huge influence on my emotions and I could not imagine my life without them. In addition, media makes me feel like I belong, makes me realize that somewhere in the world there are people like me. I strongly felt that during the lockdown last winter when I was forced to spend my days being home alone. Then social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram made me smile, helped to conquer my loneliness.

Maybe media means so much to me because I did not have a life without it? Maybe if media disappeared and I could not watch TV or send a selfie to my mom I would get used to it and my life would be completely different. However, now I use media every day in one way or another and life without it seems unimaginable. When social media platforms I use the most did not work this week I realized how different life would be without checking my phone. The thing that made this social media crash easier was the fact that it was not just me who could not post anything, it was the whole world. In addition to that, this event made me think about how dependent we all are from media. 

In conclusion, media is like a human without a body who helps me live my life and is there is in brightest and darkest moments. Since media has always been in my life, I could not imagine living without it. I heart it, because wherever I am, media makes me feel like I belong, makes me feel like I am home.

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It’s not new when I say I have a love and hate relationship with my media. Everyone does, right? It tests your self-discipline and self-control every day, and when you failed to be productive in real life, when you surfed through social media for hours, when you finished season 3 of Sex Education in two days or when you were focusing too much on taking a picture of your dinner and your outfit rather than enjoying the actual moment, you feel like the worst version of yourself that you didn’t even know existed in the first place. As we learned in class, media is an amplifier. So when it enhances my worst traits to the point that I don’t even recognise myself, not gonna lie it scares me. I get caught up in organising my instagram feed for hours, consuming meaningless tiktoks after youtube videos after pinterest ideas and after that I get into an existential crisis of “Is this what my life has become? I am not living my days to the fullest, instead I consume hours of screen time. Instead I organise my feed and my stories so that I am cooler than this girl and that girl”. And then after each existential meltdowns, I decide to be productive, detox for a while, not use my phone, but then I do it again the next day, and the cycle continues. It’s like binge eating. You deprive yourself from food all day just to binge at night on your guilty pleasures, but then you feel like crap the next day, and so you restrict again, and then binge, and then the guilt follows. Endless mean cycle.

Okay, I promise there is a love part to this post, despite my rant above about how much I hate it at the same time. But I do love it. It’s essentially a creative outlet for me, a space for inspiration besides just connecting with my friends. For example, I am a big foodie. I love cooking and baking. I love getting inspirations from pinterest, from chefs on their instagrams, from college students who share their every day eats like me. I love following aesthetically pleasing people – as weird as this sentence sounds – and looking at their pictures, and how they transform the most mundane moments into essentially an aesthetic piece of photography/art. I also love Facetime and Whatsapp, two very underpraised platforms of media in my opinion, when they let you be as close to your loved ones as one can imagine even if thousands of miles away. It’s brilliant!

In conclusion, I think my hate towards media comes from me being a control freak, so when I lose control over my media consumption, and feel like it takes control over me, I hate it. I feel weak and defeated. But when I think about the creativity and connection aspect of it, I love it. It’s a love and hate relationship with media and there is a thin line…

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When we talk about media, we often focus on “the big picture” – the influence of media on global politics, how they can manipulate elections all around the world, and how the internet is full of fake news, but we often forget about the little day-to-day emotions and ideas that emerge from all kinds of media.

Those little personal, emotional, and powerful pieces are what make media so important to me.
Media are a melting pot of creativity and ideas that offers anything to anyone: all kinds of emotions, content, and people. Sad? Here, listen to this playlist. Just want to turn off your brain for a moment? YouTube has a funny meme compilation for you. You want to become an activist? Here’s this website with a lot of information. Oh, and by the way: your favourite artist just released a song about this exact topic, maybe there’s an active group chat where you can meet people with the same interests and concerns?

I discovered many of my hobbies and interests through media and met so many new people and communities from all around the world.

When I was still a little kid, my mum gave me a DVD from a concert by David Garrett (a famous German violinist) as a Christmas present, and the music and skill of David fascinated me up to a point where I told her: “Mum, I want violin lessons.”
Today, almost a decade later, I lost count on how many times I watched that DVD and my violin is one of the most important things to me. I’m not sure if I would have discovered that hobby without media and I’m certain that I would have never met some of my best friends.

As I grew older, I discovered YouTube and other social media platforms. I take a significant amount of my creative inspiration from those platforms, for example through (music) videos, movies, #drawthisinyourstyle on Instagram, fan edits and memes. Currently, I am working on an artwork that is inspired by one of my favourite songs. The possibility of talking about it on Discord with other creative people I met online is something I wouldn’t want to give up. Having access to those platforms enriches and influences my life in certain areas.

But online media also made me aware of how people handle social and political issues in a different way than traditional news broadcasts or newspapers:
I love social media because they make things like Loot für die Welt [loot for the world], Friendly Fire, or #Swap possible.
Those are all German fundraising gaming events on Twitch, mostly organized by content creators and streamers, that raised a significant amount of money for different issues/organizations:

1. Loot für die Welt: raised around 360.000 euro in 2020
2. Friendly Fire: the 2020 edition raised over 1,5 million euro
3. #Swap: raised around 450.000 euro for the victims of the recent floods in Germany

Seeing that so many young, creative people are interested in those topics and want to help by educating their communities and combining their interests and realities into a big charity event is a great feeling. Young people do care – maybe even more than ever before.

It makes me happy that people use social media to voice their concerns about important topics like the climate change in creative ways that fit their communities and that, at least in Germany, a massive amount of young people got invested into politics in one way or another since rezo (a German Youtuber) uploaded a very well researched video on the current state of politics in 2019, that went viral in a few days (unfortunately, it’s only available in German):

This video is one of my all-time favourites on YouTube, because I think it is an important contribution to the (political) discussion among young people. It inspired so many people not to be apathetic anymore, to stand up and tell the world: “We are here, and we need to change some things!”

Of course, saying that media makes everything better and that this is the ultimate solution to every problem, political or not, would be naïve – but seeing those sparks of positivity media may give hope to people when everything else in there seems to be negative once again.

That is what I really like about media. Besides all the negative things we see in our feeds every day, there is so much more out there – you just have to look for it. All those little individual pieces of media attached to a positive emotion, event, memory, or good deed are the little stars that light up our incredibly diverse media landscape. And even if your funny cat video won’t change anything on a global scale, it probably changed my day at some point in my life.  

All in all, I love media because they are emotional, yet rational, funny and serious at the same time – in short: they are multi-faceted and diverse.  For the good and the bad.

M.

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We are getting asked why do we love media? I wonder if the correct question would not be: how could we not love them. They are such a vast and deeply complex world that the fact that it is still so unknown makes it the most desirable for me. Even if we tried we will not ever fully comprehend all that we have created as humans under the definition of the word media.
By exploring the media I can make myself fade from the current world that I am living in. And I mean that in the most beautiful sense of this word. The present life is starting to become one of the distant galaxies for me. The shown content at some point overlaps with my sense of reality, leaving me in the centre of a new world, hitherto unknown to me. I can feel each pain of my favourite characters like my own, the warmth of their tears on my cheeks and each of their victory I celebrate as my own. When I leave this world, despite the absence of its physical presence I can still feel it deep beneath my skin. Only ninety-three minutes on screen are able to make me reflect on my entire existence, thus affecting my mind and life permanently.
So my answer to why I love media is that without them, I wouldn’t even be the person answering this question.
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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 4^th 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