Just kidding, reading this probably definitely wont change anything about your life. Keep reading anyway though.
Every single day, whether you like it or not you are exposed to various types of media before you even leave the house. Most people do not realize some things in their life are forms of media, such as posters that are hung on the wall or in their homes. From practically a minute after I wake up, I encounter various types of media without even thinking about or realizing it. Once I took a step back and evaluated one "day in the life," I realized how much media is present in what I do everyday and how it impacts me and my life.
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| www.noaa.gov 5 day forecast |
8am, I wake up, turn off the alarm on my phone and reach over the side of my bed to grab my macbook which is charging on the floor. Open up my laptop, click on safari, and I am about to experience my first media encounter of the day. I am looking at all the latest and greatest apple products only seconds [a minute at best] after I open my eyes. The first thing I do is check my email to see if any of my professors cancelled class that day. After I check my email, I type in
www.noaa.gov (a website I would consider t be more accurate than weather.com) into the search bar to see what the weather is going to be like at Sugarbush Mountain Resort that day. The website is predicting that there is a chance for snow showers in the afternoon, awesome. I then go onto Transworld's website (
snowboarding.transworld.net) to see if they posted any new videos that I can watch before I start my day. Today, to my surprise, I find the a new addition to Bear Mountain's the "Sunday in the Park" short movie series. As I watch this video, I think to myself how incredible it is how far he internet has progressed, and that today I can sit here in bed and watch a video, and when "the internet was first invented to be an attack proof military communications network" (Media & Culture, 45)
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| The DC poster on my wall |
Now that I'm out of bed, it's time to get ready for a full day of fun in the sun on the hill. As I stumble down the hallway and into the kitchen, I glance at the wall behind the couch and see the massive DC shoe company banner. Media experience numero dos. DC is a shoe company that focuses around "action sports," and has been around for quite some time. They sponsor some of the best athletes in the world in a number of different sports including skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, BMX, as well as motocross and rally car racing. I make some coffee and in the mean time try to figure out what other media I have hanging around my apartment. On my walls I can see fliers advertising local concerts, and other random posters and signs from snowboard movie premieres, and competitions.
I reach into the fridge to get the milk out, and in the process see an article from the Vermont Cynic titled
Yelawolf Gone Wild taped to my fridge. This is an article about the rapper "Yelawolf" and his opening performance for Wiz Khalifa, one of my favorite mixtape artists. Wiz khalifa is from Pittsburgh, PA and is responsible songs like "Black and Yellow," "In the Cut," and "Say Yeah". Even though a couple of his newest songs are good, I still think the music he made in past years are his best. "Yelawolf's" decision to punch a student in the face while on stage earlier this semester at UVM earned him a picture on the front page. This is just about the only newspaper that I would say that I read occasionally. Newspaper is not my favorite type of media, I find it to be on the boring and dry side most of the time, since all it consists of is a bunch of black and white typed columns. The Vermont Cynic is a newspaper that I find to be somewhat more enjoyable to read because it focuses on happenings at UVM and around the Burlington area, which means it could potentially be relevant to my life and my plans.
"Great to be Here" one of Wiz Khalifa's best songs in my opinion
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| Grateful dead bear |
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Jay-Z throwing up
up his trademark "rock" |
After I make my way out of my humble abode, I find my way to my car which is parked somewhere on the street. I make some calls to my friends and let them know them that I am on my way to pick them up to go to Sugarbush. Using the power of telecommunications makes planning and communicating incredibly easy compared to if this technology did not exist. Its freezing this morning, I blast the heat and turn on the radio. Radio is yet another media encounter that I have had, and I haven't even left my block yet. Back home in New Jersey, I would turn on 'hot 97,' 97.7, a well known radio station that is broadcasted out of New York City. I don't really know what radio station is on at the moment, but the radio in Vermont is certainly a lot different from where I was raised in New Jersey. It seems that the people up here are not as into the hip hop / pop music as people in the NJ/NY area, and more into music like the Grateful Dead and The Doors. I think this is cool though, to see two different cultures firsthand I mean. Radio has come a long way from its roots. in 1916, a man placed a microphone in front of his phonograph and broadcasted music over an experimental radio station to his friends two nights a week. This made him the first unofficial DJ in radio history (Media & Culture, 116)
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| ^this is an iTrip^ |
On the way to Sugarbush, we play music through the radio from someone's iPod with a device called an iTrip. an iTrip is a small white device that plugs into the bottom of an iPod, and transmits the song that is being played by way of radio signal to a station that does not get picked up in the area, and gets played through the car stereo. It is a pretty amazing contraption for how small it is. This gives people the opportunity to play whatever songs they want to hear without any annoying commercials.
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| lift pole with stickers on it |
We arrive at the mountain, its colder than we thought it would be but that's just because its pretty windy. This first chair that we ride up that day is covered in stickers from various outerwear and snowboard manufacturing companies. This is a way companies get their name out there, as their stickers sometimes are conversation starters for people on the lift. People also have stickers and such on their snowboards as well. Most people do this because they think it looks cool. Others are obligated to put stickers and die-cuts on their boards because they have agreements with sponsors to wear, promote, and advertise their gear.The rest of the day goes on perfectly, everyone having a great time shredding and messing around all day.
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| Transworld 'Buyers Guide' cover |
As I arrive at my apartment, I check my mailbox and to my surprise a new Transworld Snowboarding came. About once a month from September through may a new edition gets mailed out. Transworld Snowboarding is the largest snowboard magazine in the world today, which contains award winning photography, articles about competitions, and athlete's lives and injuries. Once a year Transworld publishes a "buyers guide," which is basically a bunch of consumer reviews of the new products that are about to hit the shelves.
After a long day on the mountain, its time to put the feet up and relax my muscles. I plop down onto my couch and pickup my laptop from the table in front of me and turn on the TV. As I check my Facebook, a social networking site that I (along with most of the collegiate population) am somewhat addicted to, I hear the depressing stories on the news about some group of people attacking another group of people, with the sound of machine gun fire in the background while some famous reporter is telling a story from far away. After I see that I have an astounding 0 new notifications, I click on a tab titled "Whiskeymilitia.com" to see if there are any good deals that I cannot afford to pass up.
www.Whiskeymilitia.com is a one-deal-at-a-time style website, which essentially takes one product from their mother site, (
dogfunk.com) and sell it at a very large discount, usually at least fifty percent off the original retail price. Then, I watch the news for a couple more minutes. Once the news gets pretty depressing I turn it off. simultaneously I turn on my xbox 360 to play some skate 2 and end my day on the right note.
Unless you have literally lived under a large rock for your entire life, media plays a somewhat large role in the way modern society functions. Almost minute of every day, people are exposed to some sort of media; even when they are trying to 'get away from it all' by going back to their living establishments The way we have been brought up to be comfortable around so much media in almost all of our environments makes me realize how amazing it is that we do not even notice it most of the time. If people noticed every aspect of media that is present at all times, chances are good it would drive them insane. Plato expressed his worries in
The Republic, "...some staged performances (media) glorified evil and that common folk watching might not be able to distinguish between art and reality." (Media & Culture, 13). Plato's concerns are still real today, which has some of the world worried about what media will do in the future and if it will change society's behavior.
photo credits:
- www.noaa.gov - I took this screen shot on my macbook
- DC poster - google images
- Wiz Khalifa - Great to be Here, thanks youtube
- Grateful dead bear - google images
- Jay-Z - google images
- iTrip - google images
- lift pole with stickers on it - google images
- Facebook - google images
- Transworld cover - google images
- Brain - google images
