Reflecting on our LOVE/Hate Relationship with Media

Activity #2

A summary of our ideas as a group:

Reflecting on our Love/Hate Relationship with Media

Print Media – it seems we agree that we love the feel and emotional connection of books.  Many of us enjoy physically turning the pages and smelling the fresh book when it’s opened for the first time.  We love the way our imagination has to construct what it reads instead of being shown exactly what it looks like, as done in movies where our creativity isn’t paramount in forming the stories in our minds.  Many of us hate the wastefulness of print and how messy inky fingers can be. 

Visual Media – many of us enjoy the flexibility of being taught through video and expressing ourselves through the many avenues of creativity in visual media, such as drawing, photographs and videos.  We don’t like how much time is wasted when we get sucked into TV and many find more bland forms of video, like documentaries, boring and uninspired. 

Sound Media – It seems we enjoy the calm that can be created through listening, but we dislike the storage space audio files take up and many of the hassles involved in downloading, storing, or condensing music down to easily accessible avenues.  The iphones and ipod have made these difficulties much more manageable. 

Digital Media – We all like the connectivity of social media, but dislike the amount of time it consumes and how people convey mixed messages sometimes.  We enjoy learning about others through videos and music combined.  It is difficult to know our limits with sharing information and pictures. 

Option #1: Write a personal reflection of your own love-hate relationship with one of the four media forms, considering some of the key ideas that emerged from the classroom conversation.

I absolutely love sound media.  I often find myself preferring audiobooks to actual books because it doesn’t cause strain on my eyes at all to just listen!  I have never been a particularly fast reader, so listening to a voice read to me is a great middle ground for my desire to be creative in reading and experiencing the world through books.  I can still formulate pictures of events in my brain while focusing on the stories unfolding.  It is also fun to listen to audiobooks in the car, which makes for a quicker journey.  The voices depicted by the narrator also add a fun element that is not included when I read to myself.  Aside from audiobooks, sound media in music is a vast source of emotional subjects for me.  I love music and all that it provides me with, but where I tend to get held up is in preparation and organization of the files.  I absolutely detest dealing with renaming, organizing, or transferring audio files of any kind.  Luckily in the weak areas in audio for me my husband steps in with his wiz skills and patience.  He makes up for what I lack in this instance and makes sure files go onto my ipod where I can access them easily and without frustration.  I realize I am very lucky he takes this annoyance and hassle out of my life when it comes to audio files and music.  Overall sound media is a pleasure for me and I am very appreciative of how easily we can share and use all forms of media in our digital world today.  We are very fortunate!