April 12, 2009
MCM 120-01
Media Mania – A Day in the Life of Savvy Sara
Where are media taking us? Can you imagine life without one of your most trusted forms of media? Are all of the media we are exposing ourselves to enabling us to make wiser decisions in life? As I look at my own life and my interactions with various forms of media I wonder am an easy target for advertisers? If I don’t think I need too much convincing then am I really a savvy consumer of media? See for yourself as you learn how a typical day unfolds for me in this world of mass media hyper commercialism which I have chosen to actively engage in.
It’s 5:21 a.m. and I wake to the sound of the BBC “news” broadcast on VPR on my clock radio. I finally roll out of bed at 5:39 a.m. after hitting the snooze button twice. Hearing the news in the early hours of the day begins to engage my neocortex as I absorb and think about the information I am listening to. For me the BBC is a trusted source of “news” and it’s not uncommon for a broadcast to include convincing testimonials by experts to strengthen their positions on any number of “newsworthy” segments. The BBC does a good job at conveying a multitude of value messages both good and bad which for me usually legitimizes the information I am receiving. As an avid listener of public radio I found it interesting to learn from our text that even as mainstream radio’s audiences are shrinking with the onset of new media like MP3 players the public radio audience is growing. Public radio has a growing and loyal audience for news and public affairs which historically mainstream radio has turned away from. Radio station owners made a decision early on to veer from “promoting citizen participation in the life of the community and public affairs that it was all but forgotten.” (Vivian 204)
While standing at the kitchen counter vigorously drinking a glass of orange juice and eating a bowl of cereal, I find myself briskly scanning the headlines of The Burlington Free Press online from my iPhone. As I haven’t had a subscription to a local newspaper since growing up when my family received two local papers and The Boston Globe, I feel this gives me the opportunity to better connect with the community I live in. Now my neocortex is really cooking with grease as I read the local headlines. This paper is particularly good at connecting with its readers through its portrayal of just your ordinary citizens which many Vermonters can relate to. Getting my news online is both convenient and very appealing at a time when we are seeing many newspapers closing its doors due to the recent economic downturn and our text makes the point that “people are finding alternatives for news, many of them online.” (Vivian 100) Therefore, as our guest speaker Brad Robertson of The Burlington Free Press told us it has become a priority of newspapers to strengthen their web content as we experience this aesthetic shift with many 21st century media consumers preferring to read their “news” on the Internet.
While standing at the kitchen counter vigorously drinking a glass of orange juice and eating a bowl of cereal, I find myself briskly scanning the headlines of The Burlington Free Press online from my iPhone. As I haven’t had a subscription to a local newspaper since growing up when my family received two local papers and The Boston Globe, I feel this gives me the opportunity to better connect with the community I live in. Now my neocortex is really cooking with grease as I read the local headlines. This paper is particularly good at connecting with its readers through its portrayal of just your ordinary citizens which many Vermonters can relate to. Getting my news online is both convenient and very appealing at a time when we are seeing many newspapers closing its doors due to the recent economic downturn and our text makes the point that “people are finding alternatives for news, many of them online.” (Vivian 100) Therefore, as our guest speaker Brad Robertson of The Burlington Free Press told us it has become a priority of newspapers to strengthen their web content as we experience this aesthetic shift with many 21st century media consumers preferring to read their “news” on the Internet.
In the meantime, the kids have woken up, they are dressed and ready for the day and we are driving towards Burlington, the first stop is daycare and then it’s on to work for me. Immediately the music requests come in from my son so I plug in the MP3 player and I select one of our household’s favorite artists, Dan Zanes. As music is such an important part of our family’s lives our children have already been exposed to many genres of music in their youth. As we listen to the lyrics of Dan Zanes it feeds my limbic brain. His quirkiness and comical demeanor and the values which are embedded in his music coincide with strong personal values that I share. Call me old fashioned as downloading music from the Internet is clearly the latest rage, I am still one to support the music industry by buying the actual cds. As we experience this technological shift in where we acquire our music, the recording industry has been slow to react to consumer behavior. Whether it’s illegal downloading or purchasing from iTunes, our text points to the fact that downloading music from the Internet is on the rise and the recording music industry has had to move quickly to get on top of the downloading technology with new retailing models as traditional brick-and-mortar stores’ music sales are declining. (Vivian 137)
As the day quickly passes and even though I find e-mail consuming large portions of my work day, I still get home at the end of the day and one of the first things I do is get on the Internet and check my personal e-mail accounts. I vividly remember when we had an account with AOL in the early days the famous words “you’ve got mail”. Whether it’s “surfing” the Web, “Googling” a topic, shopping on-line, reading blogs, or interacting in the social media space, the Internet has a strong presence in my daily life. The author of our text says that “the Web enables people to be their own editors, choosing what to read and watch rather than having those decisions made by faraway editors.” (Vivian 254) As I experience this personal shift by actively participating in the Internet craze I often feel like a young child as I experiment in this new media landscape learning new skills all the time. Watching the Internet develop over the past ten plus years I am able to see what an impact it is playing in business today. As both consumers and purveyors of media we have embarked on this cultural shift where advertisers and businesses are now tracking consumer behavior through the websites visited with the goal of understanding and relating more directly with consumers.
Dinner is just about ready so I quickly switch gears and help get food on the table. In the background we turn on “the tool of the government and industry too which is destined to rule and regulate you.” (Frank Zappa) Whether it’s watching the evening “news” with Brian Williams and then Katie Couric the stories all start sounding the same. In between the brief snippets of information at this time of day the advertisements are usually one drug commercial after another. Advertisers almost have you convinced that you have some sort of condition that you begin to wonder if you really might need the latest drug that they’re pushing. I’ve refused to be a complete slave to the tube as we’ve held off getting a satellite dish and cable doesn’t come down our road. My parents’ generation the television seems to always be on for background noise. That would seem to make sense as our text book says “that almost every household in the U.S. which has at least one television set on average, the television is playing about seven hours a day in those households.” (Vivian 209) Many people in society have abused television to the point where being a couch potato is an accepted form of activity and the allure that it once stood for in the golden years has long been forgotten.
After getting through the dinner hour we start heading upstairs at 7pm to get the kids ready for bed which entails getting their pajamas on, washing up and then they begin to unwind as we read them books. Lately our son has been interested in reading I Spy’s and Where’s Waldo’s which are developing his skills of concentration and object identification. Then he usually picks out one of his many Thomas the Tank Engine books where phrases like “I’m old square wheels”, “cinders and ashes”, “ you pouty puffer” and “you’re a galloping sausage” come alive from the pages in the stories. Our daughter on the other hand loves hearing Peggy Rathman’s Ten Minutes to Bedtime, Is Your Mama a Llama or any book with animals. As these days children’s books are primarily what I’m reading we try and pick books with strong value messages. I often read book reviews on Amazon.com in search of new children’s books. In our household going to the bookstore is considered a fun outing and it’s not uncommon that we can spend quite a while there. So even though our text points to a “growing concern that young people are drifting away from books and people are increasingly alliterate, meaning that they can read but choose not to” (Vivian 71), I feel as long as I can instill in my children the importance of reading by making it a fun activity then I can only hope that they will not become one of these statistics.
With the kids all tucked in bed I retreat back downstairs where for the last few hours left in the day I can truly find some time to unwind. Meanwhile my husband has cued up the dvd player with the movie we received from Netflix titled Tune in Tomorrow the documentary of the Waterbury, VT based WDEV community radio station. In reflecting on this film what filmmaker Ed Dooley does so well is interview respected individuals in the community whose testimonials reinforce the importance of community radio as a cornerstone to a community offering unique programming with flexibility at a time in commercial radio where robo-programming is the norm. Since viewing the film I find myself streaming the live audio from 9 to 11am through my headphones while at work. What I value in community radio is that during talk shows when listeners call in it is refreshing to hear the perspectives of my fellow Vermonters from all sides of the issues. Additionally, I appreciate what Bill McKibben said in the film that community radio like WDEV can be appealing to listeners because you can take an interest in learning a little bit about everything. As I often prefer watching independent films which make their debuts at the various film festivals as our text mentions “for those films that are produced by the so-called independent studios once they establish a track record they end up being acquired by a major studio.” (Vivian 168) So these days it seems even more difficult to find a truly authentic independent film and Tune in Tomorrow seems fits this description.
Well it’s now that time in the evening when I find myself beginning to dose so I pull myself off the couch and head upstairs to get ready for bed. Once in bed I usually thrust one last ditch effort to glance at a magazine that is sitting on the floor by my bed. Tonight I chose National Geographic Adventure where I’m taken to east Africa and retracing the steps of an elephant that walked hundreds of miles in the story The Secret Lives of Elephants. In this feature article the author uses scientific evidence as it sites leading experts in the field and rhetorical questions to further engage the reader. Unlike earlier in the history of magazines where icons such as Life and the Saturday Evening Post had an appeal to most readers our text mentions “when the industry was reinventing itself it sought slices of the mass audience, not the whole.” (Vivian 118) Thus the couple magazines that I currently subscribe to like Yankee and National Geographic Adventure would fall into this category of a niche media appealing to specific populations within society. As I near the end of the article I find it getting harder and harder to stay awake so I put the magazine on the floor, make sure my alarm is set and shut off my light so that I can do it all over again the next day.
I’m surprised I don’t dream more about my daily experiences with mass media and if I did, would they be nightmares? Life is like a train that is moving at high speed looking out the window the landscape is changing and I’m not sure where I’m going & when I’ll be getting off. I’m feeling excited to be living in a time where I can actively engage in the making of media tools. I don’t think we’ve yet realized the impact the digital age is having on our lives. Will we slow down to catch our breath and if we do will we skip a beat? What will our media landscape look like in a year, in five years or even ten years out and will any or most of the media platforms be a just a memory and stories we can tell our children and grandchildren? Only time will tell.
Dinner is just about ready so I quickly switch gears and help get food on the table. In the background we turn on “the tool of the government and industry too which is destined to rule and regulate you.” (Frank Zappa) Whether it’s watching the evening “news” with Brian Williams and then Katie Couric the stories all start sounding the same. In between the brief snippets of information at this time of day the advertisements are usually one drug commercial after another. Advertisers almost have you convinced that you have some sort of condition that you begin to wonder if you really might need the latest drug that they’re pushing. I’ve refused to be a complete slave to the tube as we’ve held off getting a satellite dish and cable doesn’t come down our road. My parents’ generation the television seems to always be on for background noise. That would seem to make sense as our text book says “that almost every household in the U.S. which has at least one television set on average, the television is playing about seven hours a day in those households.” (Vivian 209) Many people in society have abused television to the point where being a couch potato is an accepted form of activity and the allure that it once stood for in the golden years has long been forgotten.
After getting through the dinner hour we start heading upstairs at 7pm to get the kids ready for bed which entails getting their pajamas on, washing up and then they begin to unwind as we read them books. Lately our son has been interested in reading I Spy’s and Where’s Waldo’s which are developing his skills of concentration and object identification. Then he usually picks out one of his many Thomas the Tank Engine books where phrases like “I’m old square wheels”, “cinders and ashes”, “ you pouty puffer” and “you’re a galloping sausage” come alive from the pages in the stories. Our daughter on the other hand loves hearing Peggy Rathman’s Ten Minutes to Bedtime, Is Your Mama a Llama or any book with animals. As these days children’s books are primarily what I’m reading we try and pick books with strong value messages. I often read book reviews on Amazon.com in search of new children’s books. In our household going to the bookstore is considered a fun outing and it’s not uncommon that we can spend quite a while there. So even though our text points to a “growing concern that young people are drifting away from books and people are increasingly alliterate, meaning that they can read but choose not to” (Vivian 71), I feel as long as I can instill in my children the importance of reading by making it a fun activity then I can only hope that they will not become one of these statistics.
With the kids all tucked in bed I retreat back downstairs where for the last few hours left in the day I can truly find some time to unwind. Meanwhile my husband has cued up the dvd player with the movie we received from Netflix titled Tune in Tomorrow the documentary of the Waterbury, VT based WDEV community radio station. In reflecting on this film what filmmaker Ed Dooley does so well is interview respected individuals in the community whose testimonials reinforce the importance of community radio as a cornerstone to a community offering unique programming with flexibility at a time in commercial radio where robo-programming is the norm. Since viewing the film I find myself streaming the live audio from 9 to 11am through my headphones while at work. What I value in community radio is that during talk shows when listeners call in it is refreshing to hear the perspectives of my fellow Vermonters from all sides of the issues. Additionally, I appreciate what Bill McKibben said in the film that community radio like WDEV can be appealing to listeners because you can take an interest in learning a little bit about everything. As I often prefer watching independent films which make their debuts at the various film festivals as our text mentions “for those films that are produced by the so-called independent studios once they establish a track record they end up being acquired by a major studio.” (Vivian 168) So these days it seems even more difficult to find a truly authentic independent film and Tune in Tomorrow seems fits this description.
Well it’s now that time in the evening when I find myself beginning to dose so I pull myself off the couch and head upstairs to get ready for bed. Once in bed I usually thrust one last ditch effort to glance at a magazine that is sitting on the floor by my bed. Tonight I chose National Geographic Adventure where I’m taken to east Africa and retracing the steps of an elephant that walked hundreds of miles in the story The Secret Lives of Elephants. In this feature article the author uses scientific evidence as it sites leading experts in the field and rhetorical questions to further engage the reader. Unlike earlier in the history of magazines where icons such as Life and the Saturday Evening Post had an appeal to most readers our text mentions “when the industry was reinventing itself it sought slices of the mass audience, not the whole.” (Vivian 118) Thus the couple magazines that I currently subscribe to like Yankee and National Geographic Adventure would fall into this category of a niche media appealing to specific populations within society. As I near the end of the article I find it getting harder and harder to stay awake so I put the magazine on the floor, make sure my alarm is set and shut off my light so that I can do it all over again the next day.
I’m surprised I don’t dream more about my daily experiences with mass media and if I did, would they be nightmares? Life is like a train that is moving at high speed looking out the window the landscape is changing and I’m not sure where I’m going & when I’ll be getting off. I’m feeling excited to be living in a time where I can actively engage in the making of media tools. I don’t think we’ve yet realized the impact the digital age is having on our lives. Will we slow down to catch our breath and if we do will we skip a beat? What will our media landscape look like in a year, in five years or even ten years out and will any or most of the media platforms be a just a memory and stories we can tell our children and grandchildren? Only time will tell.
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