Thinking and Writing about Digital Media

After thinking about my own media consumption, I think there are three main purposes to my use of media. The first purpose of my media use is connection. Since moving away for college, I don’t talk to many of my old friends any more. I use social media as a means of staying connected and staying involved in their lives. There have been many times where I find out big life events from social media and not the person themselves. For this reason, I really appreciate media and how helpful it is to me.

The second reason I use media is for “pleasure”. I put pleasure in quotations because I feel like the pleasure it gives me is not necessarily happiness every time. I use media to take me out of the world. There are many times when I don’t want to focus on whatever needs to be done so I use media as an escape. Sometimes I read or play games to bring my self joy and just have fun. But most of the time I just sit on my phone and scroll through random things or watch TV, wasting my time. This is the aspect of media that I feel like I need to be more aware of my choices. Frequently I do this type of activity during classes, late at night, or during homework time. All that scrolling and watching is counterproductive and then causes me to fall behind and feel more stressed than I already am. I don’t feel like what I am looking at is bad or in any way out of line with the teachings of the church but it ends up hurting me because I allow it to consume my life.

The last main purpose of my media consumption is work. I use media all the time for school, work, and researching things in my everyday life. The only way to do school now a days is by fully embracing media, technologically based or not. Learning Suite, books, power points, they are crucial media we use in our education. For my job I use media all the time to send emails to all of my students. And in my normal life I use media to find recipes and to answer those random questions that come up at the dinner table. This type of media usage is great and is completely ingrained in our culture. This is type of usage that becomes helpful in a secondary classroom. Using media to teach helps engage our students because they are familiar with it. It also makes our lives a little easier as we can connect with other educators that can help us with creating lesson plans. Media is a huge part of our students’ culture and by embracing it in their education they will be able to better succeed.

Media is a large part of my life and to deny its presence would be wrong. However, I need to be more proactive in my media consumption decisions.