Why I Heart My Media

My thoughts about media are still a mystery to me. I don’t always want to be in a relationship with it, but trying to live without it is too difficult. Other times, I only see the positive aspects of media and can’t imagine a life without them. Media has always been a big part of my daily life, but it used to be something I used when I was bored or when I really needed it. It has recently become quite meaningful to me. I moved to Amsterdam from my home country, and media allows me to stay connected to my family and friends back home without actually being there. I can look at my friend’s social media posts and feel as if I’m there with them, I can video call my mom and see her smile and I can watch a movie with my boyfriend even when we’re 1000 km apart. I’m very grateful to live in a time where media exists, but I’m also still learning about it and its good and bad sides.

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Media is something that I cannot live without. 

Since I am an international student living in a different country and a continent that I have never been to, 8000 km away from my family, makes me use media not as a want but as a need. 

For example when I video call with my family, I try to focus on them and feel as if they are actually here but then when I see the red ‘end call’ button, it makes me realize that I am not in the same room as them. This remediation theory makes me feel like without media I will be unable to keep in touch with my family but also makes me feel like they are there with me all the time.

I love media because of this. I love how it makes us feel like we are constantly in touch with the entire world yet it is watching every single move we make. 

It’s fascinating how I get an ad about something that I was talking to my parents about the previous day when I didn’t even make a google search. It’s like it is listening to everything we do and then tries to make it ‘easier’. 

I love media because it makes our everyday tasks much more simple. How media as artifacts have really saved a lot of time especially during the pandemic. Things such as contactless payments, online learning etc have really taught us to value our devices a little more every single day.   

What do you guys think would happen if we became media and the only thing that existed was media and nothing else?

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I love media. I love waking up and checking my notifications and scrolling through Instagram. I love media, it’s there for me every second of every day. Whenever I feel restless and feel my heartbeat rising, it’s there for me. I pull my phone out of my pocket and just scroll endlessly. It’s an escape. I love media. Whenever I feel like there’s too much going on in the room, TikTok is there for me. As I sit here, writing this blog post, my TV is on. Media is constantly on; I feel like I’m being watched and taken care of. I love media, it is always there to fill in the white noise of my empty apartment.

 I love media, because whenever I feel like I’m alone, I can check Snapchat and see all the different activities that people in my life, both physically and digitally are up to. I love media. I spent thousands of dollars making sure that I have the best and most updated devices so that I can constantly indulge in media. As I look up, I see my TV, it’s muted. I see my iPad next to me, ready to watch some Netflix. I feel my phone in my pocket, buzzing, every time someone messages me. I love media, it fills my life with noise so that I don’t feel the emptiness of starting a new life thousands of miles away from my home.

I love media. It’s a good distraction to keep myself busy and my mind away from the daunting feelings of loneliness of moving away from home. I love media, it feels suffocating at times, but it’s always there for me.

Do I love media? It’s always on. There’s no escape. But then I think to myself, without media life would be dull. Wouldn’t it? It’s an escape from the world, but do I need to escape from media? Or does the constant need to have media make normal life seem dull…

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But wait, did I seriously just take a break between sentences because I felt the need to scroll on Instagram? Do I love media? Or do I feel like it replaces the warmth of being at home? Do I love media or am I just so fascinated by it, that I cannot see past it? Why do I feel the need to check my phone every 5 minutes, knowing that nothing would change if I didn’t? Is my relationship with media toxic? Do I love media? Or has life evolved that we are taught to love something that isn’t necessarily good for us? Has life evolved that we cannot see past media? Do I love media, or was I just raised to love it? Do I love media? Or has it just become integrated into my daily life that I cannot imagine life without it?

I don’t love media. It prevents me from enjoying my 10-minute walks to the metro station. It prevents me from focusing on conversations with friends. It prevents me from enjoying the sunset without taking a picture of it for everyone to see. But wait, media connects me to my family. It connects me to my friends. It makes me feel okay. It helps me cope with moving so far away from home.

I do love media, but I think this relationship is toxic. Damn, never thought I’d have a love-hate relationship with a digital cloud. But isn’t that what unconditional love essentially is?

But then again, do I love media?

Sindi, 13685899

I have to confess that i am living almost all my life in the infinite media universe. Media somehow recorded all the clips of my life.

Form the pictures of my childhood, I realize i have so many relatives that i barely know them before . And videos, digital images had recorded all my family’s trip when i was a young innocent girl . Every time i seeing these, i know that once upon a time, i had loving parents and a happiness family 🙂

I personally would make small videos as long as me and my friends went on a trip, it was so much fun, sometimes i feel overwhelming about life and social issues, and videos always have the power that can make me laugh and feel calm.

Also, from media,precisely from the big database, i found that thousands of missing children in china have been found every year with new solution , they print posters of missing children on the parcels, and through the express delivery,Information about missing children is being disseminated everywhere，in the end,more missing children has been found through media universe.

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I love media as It causes me to seek, desire and search. As a child, I remember taking away my father’s laptop to play games, to see some cooking videos, or to watch previous episodes of Dora the explorer which I missed due to school and were not airing on the television again. It made me desire to see more and more of the world, have dreams, think big. I wonder if, my parents would send me to a faraway country to study if it wasn’t for media?

Last year, I was low on self-esteem, I barely ate, and I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to live on until there was this page on Instagram, which posted a quote, it had the exact words written which I needed to hear, reminding me of what it is like to be happy again and to have trust and self-confidence. It gave me an idea to make a poetry page to express myself anonymously, and to my surprise, so many people were inspired by my words, came to seek my advice, and at a point in my life, a friend of mine told me I was her inspiration. It felt good, and it made me feel alive again. This is the reason why I love my media. It inspires me (and makes me laugh…Kim wearing absolutely idk what on met gala was bahah).

According to me, media have always been evolutionary. We get to see new forms of it every passing year. It always intrigued me that how amazing and intimidating it is that we can find anything on google, bing, safari, etc. It keeps me guessing and that is why I love every form of media so much. As I have seen so many incidents where once a curious mind doesn’t feel the same excitement anymore, something within the person dies down. but with media, it is different. It allows me to keep myself updated about current affairs, celebrity life, the industry and contributes to a certain extent in helping me make better decisions about my career, and life in general. It’s fun and a platform for knowledge seekers like me.

I also love it as it keeps me connected to my family and friends far away, now I am no longer bound by geography. To be honest, there are too many reasons why I heart my media. It is flexible, measurable, and inescapable, at least in this era;)

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Araadhita, 13523309.

My relationship with media has drastically changed since my arrival in Amsterdam. Even though it is one of my biggest interests, I think that I have been scared of it most of my nineteen-year long life. As we live in media, I reckon that can be overwhelming for many of us, even unbearable at times. The pandemic forced us to stay in our homes for many months, we had to switch to online schooling, working, shopping and socializing. Our mobile phones, laptops and other devices became our closest “friends” as they enabled us to communicate with our loved ones.

So actually, my relationship with media has already somehow shifted because of the coronavirus outbreak. Although I only discovered the change during my first week here, in Amsterdam. I think that many of us might have felt a little lonely in the beginning. At least I did, but it was not because nobody liked me. I had to leave my whole life behind me, say goodbye to all my friends, my family and my boyfriend. It was me, who left all of them there, which left me with a guilty conscience. But as days passed I have gotten used to this place and discovered it is not so bad, after all. And media played a big part. Thanks to media, I can hear my parents’ voices every day, and watch films with my boyfriend. I can also gossip with friends and see my sister’s new hairstyle. Through media I can keep in touch with all of them and be here at the same time.

This is why I love my media. During such a big shift in my life, it helped me feel close to all the people I care about. I don’t want to become completely dependent on it, I think that people have a tendency to fall in love a little too much. I am in Amsterdam and I truly want to cherish the opportunity that I got, but at the same time share it with my friends and family. And, for me, that is exactly what media is here for.

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As everyone else here, I grew up with a huge influx of media basically raising me.

I ♡ my media. I really do.

I may have my romantic, nostalgic memories of playing Minecraft with no worries on my mind when I was younger.

I still enjoy playing this game and building contraptions until I forget the very concept of time and realize, full of regret, that it’s 3am already and I must attend my lecture in just a couple of hours.

I am a fan of a variety of different series that I binge-watch once a new season comes out, talking to everybody I know and annoying the hell out of them while I ramble for what seems like an eternity.

I use Reddit on the bus just observing what the world has been up to or just mindlessly scrolling through memes while listening to Megalovania for the third time this ride.

I remember getting into trouble with my dad because I bought a ringtone from the teletext for 10€ because of my technical illiteracy. Good times.

Although this blog posts name is “Why I ♡ my media”, this isn’t only about love. Your heart may carry a lot of different complex emotions, love not being the only one. This is about concerns.

I deleted Instagram for my own betterment. Constantly checking what everyone does, seeing how perfect their lives may seem in front of the camera, always comparing them to yourself, that really messes with you. Setting unrealistic standards that are impossible to achieve, concluding that you are not good enough.

After a change of heart, I redownloaded Instagram once I knew that I would move to Amsterdam for sure. Before I arrived, I wanted to make sure to be connected to as many people as possible. Awkwardly opening DMs by answering to their stories. Asking where that specific restaurant was where they have gotten their superb looking Bitterballen from, just to strike up a conversation. Knowing no one in this city before arriving, this was the only option.

Your very personal data; stored everywhere. Nowadays, you register a profile just feeding the website of your choice so much information about yourself without even thinking about what you are doing anymore. You probably don’t even remember all the sites you have given your confidential information to.

Just one example: You sign up on Spotify, use it for a month and this data bubble knows you better than your therapist, your family or even yourself. If I’m being honest, I don’t know if I should be impressed or intimidated by the sheer amount of power a cluster of information like this can provide.

But that can’t be. They don’t really know me. Right? And if they do, am I not just a number? Am I a small cog in a clockwork full of data? Is it even that bad that they have all my info? It’s not like Google is telling my mom what I was searching for.

We post every aspect of our lives, distributing information for the world to see, generating a huge amount of revenue for those platforms. Voluntary, unpaid work. The only payment you’ll ever see as an amateur is the short burst of dopamine you get when you see that your arguably funny post on Reddit got 14 upvotes.

Our greed is fuelling a never-ending consumption culture and even more so the exploitation of underpaid workers who suffer every day to bring us the new iPhone. Unethical working conditions, suicide among those workers, already rare minerals getting scarcer and scarcer, fucking up our already screwed planet even more, the list goes on. We often forget what happens in the background so some of us can have their shiny new phone each year with barely improved features and hardware. But hey, at least the new camera zoom goes to 6x instead of 4x.

Even if this train of thoughts got dark suddenly, we must appreciate the technological advancements that have been achieved in the last decades. We can connect with peers across the globe just by moving a mouse cursor. Talking to them face to face, meeting new people that may live more than 1000 kilometres away from you and playing your favourite games with them in real time (although sometimes with a frustrating delay), even if an entire ocean may be separating you from them. Since the pandemic started, there has been a huge revolution in the digital landscape. Education experienced a huge overhaul and became an online experience all of a sudden, people started working from home, a concept which would have been considered a luxury before. The sudden boom of software like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, people making progress over an online shared spreadsheet: All of this because of urgency to not endanger the weak and old.

We’ve seen a lot of positive and negative aspects of the medial landscape, which may lead to the ultimate question of “Is Media good or bad for us?”. It neither is good nor bad. The impact media has in our society is astonishingly complex and not a simple black and white imagery. If we live in a utopia (regarding the technological advancements that have happened during the past couple of decades with an even more promising landscape for future innovation) or in a dystopia (workers in Africa suffering from exploitation, others experiencing body dysmorphia because of unrealistic beauty standards), that is up for you to decide.

All I can say, is that I really, really ♡ my media.

Miguel Witek, 13743643

I have a girlfriend. I love her. I love her so much. So how could I ever compare the love I feel for her to the love I feel for media? How could all of media form the same complex and beautiful relationship I have with her?

Love is a very loaded term. Not only does it imply the existence of a special kind of relationship, but it also implies the dedications, efforts, and hardships that come with it. And then there’s the term media; perhaps less loaded, but still equally broad. It encompasses such an intense volume of things – social media, advertisements, websites, movies, music, clips, pictures, data – that there’s no way to keep track of them all.

All this complexity, all these moving parts, all these bits that are so incompatible with unconditional love… I realised they don’t really matter. I don’t believe I am in love with media. In fact I don’t believe anybody is. But I do believe we all genuinely love one – and only one – form of media.

I consider myself an introvert and enjoy spending a lot of time simply thinking, analysing, and categorising things. I’ve noticed that I am a rather neutral person and that it takes something truly special to get me to get emotional – not that it’s a problem, I’m actually rather content with this state of being. But I know that my girlfriend is the only person in the myriad of people I have met throughout my lifetime who manages to constantly give me emotional catharsis. Every time I see her I genuinely feel the most beautiful thing I have ever felt.

But there is another. One thing that isn’t alive that I share this same relationship with.

I have fallen in love with movies.

Whole-heartedly, the medium that is film is the only other aspect of this world that makes me feel the same way I feel for my girlfriend. It immerses me into worlds, into its ideals and incredible moral conflicts, and this has led to something that I suppose can be considered love. I wouldn’t want to phrase it that way, I’d only say I love my girlfriend, but deep down I think we all share that same feeling of catharsis with at least one form of media, so I guess I can say…

I Heart Movies

Justin Hardy – 13610163

Sometimes I think about breaking us up, but every time I do, I get sucked back in. Because how could I live without him? How could I live without his entertainment? Without his comfort? The belly laughs and the validation? He keeps me connected and makes sure I never have to miss anything. He makes me cry. Happy tears. Sad tears. He makes me feel special. He is there for me – even when no one else is. I need him.

And yet he is constantly begging for my attention. Ping. Ping. Ping. He is so distracting. Is he even authentic? Telling the truth? Or am I being manipulated for attention? An ever-shortening attention span. He makes me feel isolated from the rest of the world. He makes me worried and induces my anxiety. He makes me question my worth and if I’m doing enough. He makes me feel inadequate. Like failure is not allowed.

And yet I can’t go without him. Because if I did, I would be the only one. Unable to receive the benefits of our relationship while continually being confronted with his presence. I would be an outsider. And he’s my ticket in.

Ping. He lets me know Netflix has added a new season of my favourite show. And I am back in. Forgetting all the negatives until it becomes too much, and the cycle begins again.