– You can spend your thirty-five-minute train journey scrolling through your Facebook feed and reading posts from people you haven’t seen in six years.
– You can communicate with your best friend on a party through WhatsApp, even though you’re right next to each other, just so you can gossip about that friend you hate.
– You can spend thirty minutes on one photo just so it matches your Instagram feed.
– When you have a day where you won’t get out of bed for no reason, you can watch someone else do more exciting things through their vlogs on YouTube.
– About vlogs, you can record your boring life and get paid for it.
– Through media you can pretend you think something is funny by typing HAHAHA even though you’re not actually laughing.
– You can stalk friends nowadays by adding them on Snapchat.
– When you’re broke and you want sushi, you can watch other people eat sushi on YouTube and still feel satisfied.
– You can skip a lecture and watch it back in the middle of the night when you got ‘time’.

Michelle de Vos

I love media because it allows me to delve into my own little world; one I can completely customise and arrange – from what kind of people and blogs I follow and read on Tumblr or Instagram to all the videos and series i can watch. It’s like a safe little spot i can always turn to no matter what may be going on in my ‘real’ life. It’s also had such a huge impact on my life in general and what and how I do things on a daily basis; now that I live alone I always watch a video whenever I’m eating a meal, whilst I’m cleaning up, cooking or showering I put on music or a podcast I really like. I follow blogs on Tumblr that I can identify with and that share content I can relate to. It’s totally personalised and follows me wherever I go. It’s become, what I would call, an extension of myself as well as a part of me and who I am and what I stand for. I can learn pretty much ANYTHING online and through the use of media – I look up recipes every single day for inspiration on what to make for lunch, I look up 1 hour long guided yoga or meditation sessions, I brush up on my Dutch on DuoLingo every single day, if I decide that I want to learn how to play the harmonica all I need is to type it into google before I get redirected to thousands of video tutorials. It’s absolutely amazing! The possibilities are endless. I have no clue how to use editing software, but hey, soon enough I will have watched 5-6 youtube tutorials on it and I’ll be good to go to edit the creative assignment for this course. And not to forget, is the connectivity media offers. Just being able to talk to people who are physically so out of reach or on the other side of the planet makes many things so much easier. It allows for friendships to be taken to a whole new, international level. Thanks to Snapchat and their geofilters i was able to see that a friend who I haven’t seen in over 3 years was on holiday in Amsterdam and so we were able to meet up again completely randomly. All of this is why I love media and why it has become such an important part of my life.

Dogasu Sitil

In some situations, media can be the most convenient thing. Trying to focus on one aspect is a difficult thing to do because media has such a broad meaning; but let me just focus on one thing for now: the internet.

TBH, new types of media are awesome. Remembering the newspaper lying on the kitchen table makes me think. All I did was looking at the headline (or let’s say the picture): Sometimes only a boring local event which I didn’t really care about. I remember classmates making ‘fun’ of me because I didn’t read the newspaper or didn’t get the latest news. In the last few years, this has changed. I started to be way more interested in news because of one simple thing: my phone. Accessing news coming from all over the world got a lot simpler. You suddenly could read the news on a small digital screen laying on your bed, adjusted to your preferences (ranging from the latest Kim Kardashian gossip to the newest technologies). When something special you’re interested in happened, you would simply get a notification. And this is just a little aspect of new media. Just think about how easy it is to interact with your friends and family just with a 4.7-inch screen, while you had to actually leave your room just to ask a friend if he wants to play with you as a child. Sure, there are a lot of downsides to media, but could I still live without it? My answer to that is No. I heart my media because I love looking things up all day, even the oddest stuff. And aren’t we all grateful to be able to stalk anyone we want whenever we want?

 

Femke van de Water

Keeping close with my favourites.

Choy Travers

When I was in primary school I had long Lunar New years holidays and I was just wondering what should I do and I decided to watch Korean dramas and movies from that moment I started watching different tv shows which created an interest for me to watch and learn more about media.

Media was and is still now is a room where I can breathe and escape from outside world. Me living in India for 8 years and living now in Netherlands created a distance between Korean culture. Despite this kind of barricades, media has developed a route that helped me to get connected to Korean culture. Live broadcast, online streaming, and download have really helped my school and university life. Watching tv Shows was one of my ways to get rid of stress from school and work and during the moment when I watch them I feel really relaxed and entertained and forget about the happenings which helped me to gain confidence and was also form of motivation.

Riding a bicycle and coming to school is really boring without any music. Hearing music and coming to school in the morning really pump up my mood and makes me to be active in class and make my day really chill and happy.  Going to K-pop concert in Netherland was my first-time experience and watching and listening to Korean songs live was so much different from hearing from my phone. Despite being a Korean Artist there were a lot of people from different countries and this made me understand how music can create a strong cultural relationship and how music can break a barrier of communication which has really made me to understand the power of music as a source of media

 

This realization from my life experience has made me love Media and why I cannot leave them

I love my media because it’s multifaceted. I love Facebook because I can still observe the shenanigans that go on back home in Ireland. I can see my mad cousin Paul’s angry statuses on global corporations, and pictures of my little cousin’s first communion. Every morning I make use of the Internet to stream the Irish radio and hear Ryan Tubridy talk about the same topic for 6 months. In terms of media use, this is probably what I’m most grateful for!

I love media because I love to learn. Platforms like YouTube are abundant in knowledge. Just yesterday I learnt about a range of topics, from why Stephen King despises Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, to how pink became a colour associated with femininity. I love YouTube because those two topics, self contained, are not typical pieces of information you might stumble upon during your day to day, but content creators make that possible.

I definitely don’t love using my iPhone as much as other media artefacts, and I definitely don’t love Instagram, Snapchat, or Facebook notifications, but that doesn’t mean that I write off my media altogether, I just choose to omit certain aspects. I love WhatsApp for it’s group chat functions, which benefit me from time to time, and I especially love the mute function. My phone is always on silent and I love that I have the choice to check my phone and that I don’t feel a compulsion to. I love that it’s there when I need it, and isn’t stating it’s presence when I don’t.

For me media is all about escape and that’s also why I  love it and why I am addicted to it. When you feel sick of Amsterdam you can go on google maps and go to Alaska or Singapore. You can binge watch an entire season of Prison Break to forget all about the upcoming exam week. You can read the news to forget about your own mess of a life. Media is an escape from reality.

I love my media because it poses a paradox which I believe will define our generation in the future. We have unlimited knowledge at our fingertips – and utilise only a fraction of it. We endlessly engage in social media platforms that were designed to help us connect with each other – only to find us isolating ourselves behind a screen in social situations. We aspire to make friends with interesting people, but the only profiles we’re really interested in – both online and in reality – are our own. I love my media because it is so good at holding up its mirror to our faces only to point out how foolishly we behave.

Stella Rozenbroek