1.2 Media and your life

After studying this section, you will be able to:

• reflect on the roles of media in your life

• assess your media usage habits: why you choose specific media and how often you use it

• understand the difference between active and passive media consumption

• evaluate how media impacts how you perceive the world.

Now that you have a better understanding of media, revisit the process you began in Section 1.1 of communicating a message, idea or principle that is important to you. Again, try to keep it simple. This time, choose the media form and platform that you think is most suitable for communicating this message. Share your piece of media with a small group (four to five students). Discuss the following questions:

• What is the most common media form chosen amongst the group? Discuss why this media form is used more often than others.

• If there is no common media form, discuss the reasoning behind the choices for each piece of media.

• Which media platform was chosen for each piece? Is there commonality here? Discuss the reasonings behind these choices.

Before you can even begin to reflect upon the role of media in your life, you must first consider an important question – why do I use media? What motivates you to wake up in the morning and grab your phone to check out social media posts? What makes you want to glance at the TV (even though it is really your parents that are watching)? What drives you to play video games after school instead of completing your homework? The reasons why we use media are varied and intensely personal. Although media studies requires you to explore why the masses use media, it is also vital to examine why you are drawn to use various pieces of media.

Do you find yourself using one media form more often than others? Perhaps you enjoy listening to music but don’t like to watch long films. Maybe you could spend hours reading a book but find the short postings on social media a bit of a bore. Your preferences are often motivated by a variety of factors including personality, context and environment.

Take a look at the images in Figure 1.1

Which image do you like the most? What about the image entices you? Are you entertained by the silliness of the snail on the skateboard? Perhaps you like the creativity expressed through the mirror image on the floor of the chameleon against the black background. If you like the polar bear image you may appreciate getting a quick glimpse of a moment in time – especially one that is quite difficult to capture. Thinking about why we are drawn to one thing over another can help us understand our choices.

Reflect on why you tend to use various media. Next to each of the following media forms, write short descriptions of your motivations for using them:

• TV

• print (newspaper, magazines, books)

• film/movies

• social media

• video games

• music

• radio/podcasts.

For example:

• TV: to learn about the local news, watch sports events

Don’t think about how you use the medium just yet. For now, just write down what draws you to the medium.

Pair up with a peer and discuss your lists.

• Do you have similar motivations for consuming each media form?

• With which medium do you find different motivations for consumption?

VOCABULARY consumption: the process of using or receiving something from another source.

Also, discuss why other people in your life use these same media forms.

• Are your parents’ motivations different from yours? What about your teachers’ motivations, or those of your younger siblings or cousins?

• Does age change the motivating factors for consuming each medium?

Typically, media consumption involves a purchase and payment, but not always directly. For example, it is free to use major web browsers, but information on your searches is gathered, stored, analysed and resold to other companies.

The ways that you choose to access and use media can play a key role in how you perceive the messages being delivered. For example, on many streaming sites all episodes of a TV show are available as soon as the show itself is released. You may choose to watch the full season of the show in one sitting or watch the episodes at your leisure. On the other hand, if you watch a TV show on a broadcast station, you will only be able to watch one episode per week at a specific time.

• The streaming option allows you to devour the entire season of the TV show in hours. You move from one episode to the next without much thought or reflection on what you just viewed. Before you know it, you have watched the entire season of the show and are ready to check out another one of the suggested offerings that show up in lieu of the next episode (which, sadly, will not be available for some time).

• The TV broadcast station option forces you to wait between episodes. You may build up a sense of anticipation wondering what is in store for your favourite character. Right before you are ready to watch the next episode, you must remember what happened during last week’s episode. When you finally get to the last episode, you feel invested in the story and the characters and are ready to get a sense of closure (or not – wretched cliffhangers!).

These two scenarios represent vastly different ways of exposing yourself to media. The relationship between you and what you are consuming is impacted by how you choose to engage with the product. Therefore, you need to reflect upon not only why you consume media, but how you consume media.

Working with a partner, ask each other the following questions and discuss your responses:

• What piece(s) of technology do you typically use to consume media?

• Which media form do you consume the most? The least? Why?

• Choose two media forms and discuss the platforms that you use to consume them. How does the platform impact your consumption habits?

Consider what you learned about how your partner consumes media. Did you notice any similarities with your own media consumption practices?

Think about your typical day. As you are getting ready for school, do you listen to music? When you eat breakfast, do you focus on just eating or are you doing something else at the same time? On your commute to school, what do you see and hear? Do you look out of the window and see billboards or advertisements embedded in and around public transport? At school, do you read any books? Visit any websites? How about when you walk down the halls and corridors – do you see anyone wearing branded clothing? Although the questions above are only prompting you to reflect on a short time within your full day, there is a high likelihood that you consume some type of media shortly after you wake up and continue consuming, in one way or another, until you sleep again. We have developed a society where we are highly reliant on media consumption for both information gathering and entertainment. Consequently, many of us consume media during a large portion of our day.

A sociologist studies human behaviours through the observation of social interactions and societal structures. Think about a recent journey. Imagine you are a sociologist observing behaviours of your fellow travellers while they are in transit.

• What do you think you would observe?

• What activities are commuters engaged with while they travel?

• What duration of their travel time would they be engaged in the activities listed?

• How much of these activities would use media?

One of the best ways to understand your relationship with media is to monitor your media use for 24–48 hours. There are many ways to do this:

• If you have a smartphone, you can use a monitoring app or the internal screen time monitoring system. Although this does not offer a complete view of media use (we often consume media using tools other than a smartphone), it does offer a glimpse into the amount of time you spend using specific applications.

• A better way to monitor media use is to keep a media use log. Every time you find yourself consuming media, mark it down. Table 1.4 is a sample media use log.

After documenting your media use for 24–48 hours, reflect upon the following questions in a small group:

• What time of the day do you consume media the most? Why?

• Are you comfortable with your overall media use within a 24-hour period?

• When you are not consuming media, what are you typically doing?

• Are your media use habits consistent with those of your peers?

Now that you have reflected upon why, how and how often you use media, it is important to contemplate what you get in return from your media consumption. After you binge-watch that new TV show that everyone has been watching, are you satisfied with how you spent your time? When you monitored your media usage for a day and found that you spent over two hours interacting with social media sites, are you content with how you spent that time? Our world asks us to consume media often, for various reasons, but it rarely asks us to slow down and take time to think deeply about whether the media we consume enhances our existence.

The ubiquity of modern technology at our fingertips also makes us media producers. Therefore, you must also remember to reflect upon what you get from creating media. When you take a picture and post on a social media site, what do you get in return? Are you comfortable with what you are – or are not – getting back?

Take a look at Figure 1.2. Imagine this shot is captured quickly, at a moment’s notice by the child’s mother. She happened to have her phone in her lap, noticed her son’s joy at being lifted by his father, grabbed her phone, framed the image quickly and pressed the photo button. Why would she want to create this image? Two to three years from now, when she is looking through her pictures and stumbles across this one, what feelings may it invoke?

Now, imagine that this shot was posted on social media and shared with friends and family – including you. When scrolling through your social media feed, you see this moment in time captured and shared. What do you feel when you see this image? Do you benefit from taking the time to look, and perhaps even comment, on what you see?

Although you may not have the time (or energy) to question what you get out of all the media that you consume, it is helpful to start this process with the media that exhausts a great deal of your time. When you have a better understanding of how you benefit – or not – from media, you will choose to consume media that offers you a positive return.

The most basic way that we learn about the world is through observation of what is happening around us. Much of this observation involves consuming media. When you wish to learn about what is happening in your community, you watch the local news or read the local newspaper. You could also scroll through social media pages dedicated to discussing local concerns. Quite often, our lives do not allow us time to actively, critically consume all three of these media, so we pick and choose what works for us. Sometimes we choose what is easier or faster and sometimes we choose to consume media from sources we have learned to trust. Regardless of what motivates these choices, the outcome is consumption of media.

ACTIVITY 1.8

Working with a partner, discuss the following questions:

• What does it mean to get old?

• What age would you consider old? Elderly?

• Think about the people in your life that have reached an old age. What words would you use to describe them? What do you think they do during a typical day? What do you think they do for fun?

Now, view and discuss the images in Figure 1.3, and answer the questions that follow.

• How do these images illustrate the lives of those that have reached an old age?

• What connections do you see with your own lives?

• How do these images impact your perceptions about what it means to get old? Did your perceptions of old age change after seeing and discussing these images?

If we know that we will consume media in the quest to learn about the world, our next choice is to decide if we consume actively or passively. Active media consumption involves making deliberate choices. For example, you choose to subscribe to a specific science-based magazine because the majority of the writing staff also work in science research. You read the articles online and question the conclusions or re-read some of the text so you develop a deep understanding of the concept. As an active consumer you also wish to continue the conversation and create a comment to include in the ‘user comments’ area of the page.

On the other hand, passive media consumption does not involve any premeditation or deep thought while consuming. Much of social media is designed for passive consumption, hence the scrollable nature of the content. A passive consumer scrolls through content, not because you decide to specifically seek out any of it, but because it is something to do. Although passive consumption of media is often characterised as being ‘mindless’, some part of your brain is still registering the content and therefore, it does have an effect on your perception.

The type of consumer that you choose to be will lead to how much media impacts your perceptions of the world. Are you an active or passive consumer of media?

Stuart Hall argues that media audiences are active consumers that often consume media through the lens of their own experiences and social contexts. The Active Audience Theory suggests that because audiences make sense of media through what they know and how they live, the intended message of the media creator may not be what is understood by audiences. Audiences often interpret or alter media messages to support their own beliefs which are directly connected to their social context.

Have you ever watched a film or TV show and related, intimately, to one of the characters? This character may ‘live’ an entirely different existence than you, but there is still something about the character with which you connect. Perhaps watching this character live out their fictional stories made you realise something about yourself that you had never quite admitted. Maybe this character struggled with similar personal demons and found a way to overcome them – and inspired you to do the same.

Our coexistence with each other and the media that we create and consume naturally leads to media influencing our sense of self. There is no instruction manual for how

active media consumption: the process of choosing and interacting with media in a deliberate and engaged way.

passive media consumption: little to no intention or engagement is involved in the use of media.