Term Paper 1

 

    Media is one thing that the world can't get away from. It's all around us. Everything we hear about comes from the media. Everything we learn comes from the media. We consume media more than anything every day, whether it be through music, television, or even just hearing about something through the grapevine. As a college student, those are a few ways I have noticed me using the media. From high school to now, I have utilized the media more than ever. Here are a few ways media has become a part of my everyday life as a new college student.

    The first thing I do when I wake up is look at my phone to check the time. When I do that, notifications from Outlook are always there, ready for me to open them. Through Outlook, I get insight into things happening on campus such as upcoming events, clubs, job openings, volunteer work, and more. I feel as though Outlook is an important part of my media consumption these days. After I check Outlook, I go to see what messages I have, mainly from the group chat between me and my friends who attend SAU along with me. In the mornings, I don't really have all that much time to go through social media to see what's happening in the world, so after looking through my messages and Outlook, I connect my headphones to my phone and get my music started for my journey to class.

    Music is another form of media, also one of my favorites. Music can be forms of both mass media and social media. It's one of the most popular media that my generation consumes. As I am typing this I have my music playing. Before this assignment, I didn't really care too much about my listening history, but after finding out that music is also media, I went to the two music platforms I use, Spotify and YouTube Music, and took a few screenshots of my listening history. 

    On Spotify, I have 531 songs in my "Liked Songs" playlist. I don't ever make an actual playlist, so all of the music I listen to on Spotify is in here. I've been using this application for years but a while back I lost my old Spotify account. I've had my new one since January of last year. Spotify is the music app I always use when I'm on my way to my classes.

                               

                                      

As you can see from my listening summaries on YouTube Music, I love to listen to Hip Hop, R&B, Pop, K-pop, and Japanese Hip Hop. My last updated listening time on this application was 2,256 minutes. Now I only use YouTube Music because it has higher volume settings than Spotify and I prefer my music to be loud. Despite that, I don't really use it every single day. 

    Here I will explain why my top three most used applications are in the top three. Previously, I stated that when I wake up in the mornings my messages are one of the first things I check. Throughout the day, I am always in my messages texting my SAU group chat. Me and friends chat about how our day is going, what might come up in the future, and where to meet up in our free time. TikTok is where the real "media" part of my paper comes in because it's quite literally a social media app. Me and my friend send each other videos back and forth all day, every day on TikTok. That's where most of the time of me being on TikTok comes from. The rest is me scrolling through my feed, not to send videos to my friend, but for me and my personal knowledge. The other day, I was watching videos about the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In this video, Trump claimed that immigrants were out in Springfield capturing and eating pets. I had just typed my media quiz a day before I saw this video. One of my news summaries was about this topic and in that article, it stated that the claim was false. I went to look at the comments and the majority of people were saying that his claim was 100% true. It gave me something new to look deeper into. I didn't bring that up just to increase my word count on this paper, I brought it up to show that TikTok can be a very informational and useful media application and not all the time brain rot. Google being in my top three most used apps came as a surprise for me a little bit, until I realized that my 2-D design class just may be the reason. My 2-D design class always requires me to have some kind of inspiration, Because of that, I am always on Google searching for inspo for my projects and assignments. The current project, called "The Grid" requires me to draw or design something using a grid. Each square in the grid has to be 2 inches and there has to be a different pattern for each square. I've been using Google a lot to find different patterns I can draw in each square. I didn't realize how much that class allowed me to use the media until I started typing my paper. 

     Everything I've typed here in this paper is all the media I use in my everyday college life. This assignment made me realize how many different ways it exists. Before this, I didn't even know that music was a type of media. We use, listen to, and see so many different variations of communication in the world around us. Even if we haven’t put much thought into it, the media is always there. Typing out this term paper not only helped me learn a few things about forms of media, but it also helped me learn a few things about myself that never paid attention to before. From now on, I will document all the different kinds of media I may use in the future.