Last Post :( My Reflection

Through media blogs, I have learned more than I ever thought I would. At first, I didn’t realize the impact that media blogs would have on my understanding and comprehension of the media. However, as time went on, I found myself identifying advertisements and commercials that carried specific ad techniques. Now as I reflect on it, I can see how much I have learned just by paying attention to the advertisements that are constantly vying for my attention.

            The amount of media that I see does not affect my life. It creates an outline that I feel I must fit into if I want to fit in with the rest of my peers. Media creates the trends and I follow them because I want to be accepted into our society. This is the idea of mooks and midriffs. Media has become so prominent in our society that we no longer control it. Being aware of this fact has completely changed my view of the media. What I know now is that I must be aware of how the media is trying to affect me. This class has made me literate and fluent in the world of the media. Now that I understand what it is doing, I am able to control it instead of it controlling me. By being literate in media, I am no longer fooled by an advertisement’s ploy to get me to do a certain thing or act a certain way. I can tell now when an advertisement is trying to fool the customer, and I can now avoid that.

Advertisements and commercials today hold nothing back. They will hit you will all that they can to get into your head and stay there. Since the beginning of the semester, my media habits have changed completely. In the past, I would fall for all of the commercials that would try to draw me in, especially the ones using the Need to Satisfy Curiosity or the Need to Nurture. However, I now recognize when these commercials focus on emotional appeals and not only on their product. This allows me to ignore the emotional impact they have on me. While I still love watching commercials with cute puppies, I no longer associate these commercials with using a product. This allows for me to make decisions based on logical and rational facts instead of using a product because I see a picture of a cute puppy. Overall, I am just better at recognizing a commercial’s sad attempt to draw people in. While it still might work on others, it certainly won’t work on me!

I think that it is very important to have media literacy. In today’s society, media can override anything. It is the most powerful “machine” in our world. With the media, you can either make or destroy a person, an idea, or an entire nation. The select few who control the media control everything else. With media literacy, one can decipher what the media tells you to think and what you actually think. Having media literacy will create a society filled with strong people, men and women alike, who are no longer classified as mooks and midriffs. By taking this class, I am able to understand topics with much more complexity than how the topic is presented to me by the media. I understand that the media has a bias about every topic, and unless I filter that (using my media literacy) I might not know the entire story.

An educated consumer has to be media literate and know both sides of a story. If one is not an educated consumer, they might make a poor decision with bad after-effects. For example, they might buy a product because of the emotional appeals in the commercial instead of the actual use of the product. This is a very poor purchasing habit because there might be a better product that the consumer doesn’t know about. Another important idea about being an educated consumer is the idea that if you are not an educated consumer (of media) you might make poor decisions when deciding on leaders. As we saw in the film “Miss Representation,” women are often treated differently than men in political fields. This is very bad because women account for 50% of the population, and that is not represented politically. Being media literate would allow for people to see that this is not fair and that men and women should be treated alike in political fields.

From doing these media logs, I was finally able to understand the impact that media has on my life and the ways in which our society conforms to the media’s ideas. These logs helped me understand how all advertisements use different techniques in order to gain attention from the consumer. This is very important because it made me an educated consumer. I am now able to understand how an advertisement is trying to appeal to me and how I can avoid being sucked into their trap. These logs have changed my media consumptions habits, and for that, I am so grateful.

            While I believe that I am media literate, I think it is also important to recognize that I still pay attention to certain commercials and will always be influenced by the media. However, I feel that, now, the influence of the media on me is so much weaker than ever before. I do not let the media shape my entire life anymore. To me, this is very important. The media has such a large amount of power and is such a big part of society today. If we don’t learn how to float, we will drown- it’s inevitable. Media literacy allows people to make educated and informed decisions about how media will affect them, which is very important. For this reason, I think that more classes, such as critical thinking, should be offered to make students literate in the world of media. If we do not educate students about the media now, the effect that it has on every life will never change. If we really want the world to be a better place, people must be media literate, which would allow them to understand the media, which holds so a major impact on their life. I am so glad to have taken Critical Thinking because now I finally understand the complex world of the media.