the final reflection

In my everyday life I consume way too much media. I am usually always on a various form of media whenever I am awake. I use media to wake up, having a song as my alarm in the morning, am on my phone or looking at the newspaper during breakfast, listening to music during passing period of school and in the afternoon or night, I always check my phone whether it’s to go on social media, text others or look up questions I have about homework online. I find that all of this constant use of media heavily impacts my life. When I am always looking at a screen or multitasking with media it not only affects my overall health, but social interactions between others and my work ethic.

I notice that being aware of my media consumption changes my interactions with media as it makes me constantly wonder why I use media so often- especially social media as I don’t particularly enjoy what impacts the media has on me but I feel the need to have and use it to stay connected with others and what’s going on in the world.

My media consumption habits haven’t necessarily changed this semester. Although I want to delete my accounts because I’ve realized that I really don’t need them, I always find an excuse for my usage and worry that without it, I won’t be connected to everyone around me. I have tried to restrict myself from using my phone at times during the semester while I’m doing my homework to stay more focused or while I’m at special events so I can really live in the moment and experience the event to the fullest.

I believe that being an educated consumer is important because without critical thinking skills, you can often be tricked into thinking that through certain products you will achieve or find happiness. However, as we know, buying items that are advertised to you won’t fulfill your needs and will rather continue to be an endless cycle of consumerism.

From keeping this log I learned many things. I not only got to express what I’m passionate about and connect it to the media and its effects on my life, but also learn about my classmates perspectives of the topics we were learning from reading their posts and commenting on it. It was also nice to have a different type of assignment than the traditional essays, worksheets or handwritten assignments we have in school.

Overall, through this experience I not only learned how much effect media has in my everyday life and the impacts it has on me, but I got to connect those ideas to the rest of society and how the use of media in our world has caused tremendous impacts on the way we live our daily lives.