Sunday, April 30, 2017

Society's addiction to media: Binge & Fast


Wow, what a technological rollercoaster. For this month’s blog post we have to binge ourselves with technology. Gluing our eyes and ears to a screen, whether that be our phones, tablets, computers, or television. When I first heard about the task at hand, I was a little unsure how I would go about this. It seemed a little overkill, but then I realized that in today’s society we are constantly binging on one form of media or another. We are constantly hit in the face with something digital. A screen of some sort is constantly feeding us information that has become vital to us on a day to day basis. The binge lasted from Monday to Wednesday. I really did not change a whole lot about how I went about my day. A few key things I did was, made sure I had headphones in every time I left my apartment. When I was home, the TV was turned on the entire time, even fs I was not watching it. I can promise my electric bill will be higher for this month. After Monday, this media binge was turning out to be a little more of a challenge than expected. I am not typically big into social media. I do have a Facebook, but I don’t post on it daily, not even weekly. During this three-day binge, I made sure I posted once a day. This was very unnatural to me and felt very forced. Come Wednesday I was ready to sit down and read a book. I needed some sort of decompression form technology and media all together. The binge was just one chapter in this roller-coaster week. 

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On the other side of topic, from Friday to Saturday we were asked to do a media fast. Luckily we had Thursday to try to feel normal again. From Friday to Saturday I used my phone, my laptop, and my TV as minimal as possible. The phone and laptop proved to be the toughed to give up, seeing as my life consists on school work and job hunting that required me to use those tools. It was dead week which also added some more stress to this media fast. The first day of the fast was no sweat, after the binge I was ready to avoid technology at all costs. Turned my phone off all day until I got to the rec. The rec was where I drew the line. I needed to listen to music, but I made sure I kept my phone in my pocket the whole time.

Overall, after experiencing both sides of the spectrum, I have come to the conclusion that we as a society are addicted to technology and media like one would be addicted to heroin. It runs our entire lives and younger generations are going to experience a completely different world in twenty years. I worked at a Mexican restaurant over the summer and this was a fairly nice restaurant. You had a lot of nice families coming in, sometimes young kids sometimes older. It was very sad to see every young kid with their faces glued to their iPad while the family was trying to talk to them, just hear about their day. I talking about three to five year olds with iPads, playing games while their grandparents just want to take them out to dinner. Bottom line, society is addicted to media and it is only getting worse.                            

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