Media & Society-Week One


About Me
 
My name is Aliza and I’m currently pursuing the AAOT degree in Theater at LBCC. I’m hoping to transfer to SOU and earn a BFA in Theater design with a Costume emphasis, possibly co-majoring in Emerging Media and Digital Arts. I hope to work as a designer for productions covering a range of media-from traveling outdoor theater, film and television, opera, to video and tablet games. 
Costume design is my passion but I’ve found that I also love set design and all aspects of digital game design.
There isn’t really a set delineation between what I enjoy doing academically or as a career focus and the rest of my life, so things like sewing, creating art over a variety of mediums (I love both my watercolor pencils and my Photoshop equally), and historical research, etc. all bleed through into what I put into my work. Even my love of nature finds its way into my designs.

I’m fascinated by the stories we tell, how we shape them, and how they shape us in return, so this Media and Society class sounds very interesting to me. As someone who grew up ‘with’ the World Wide Web, the new digital frontier is both familiar and dazzling to me. I both take for granted and am amazed by the tiny computer I carry around with me everywhere I go. I used to write letters to my friends the next town over and wait several days for a reply, now I use Facebook chat to carry on a conversation in real time with a friend in England. I remember when getting the news involved a drive down the road to the bright yellow Oregonian box to retrieve the newspaper-now the latest edition of the Washington Post is delivered to my phone wherever I might be. My relationship with the news is vastly changed, I used to have to actively go out and get the news (or wait for it to come on TV)-now it comes with me wherever I go.

 
The Information I Consume

My main three information sources are Facebook, the Washington Post, and a tie between the Guardian and the New York Times. I also regularly read Polygon.com but only for entertainment news.

Facebook seems somewhat inevitable as it’s the site I’m on the most. I consider it as a kind of ‘jumping off’ point for information, I almost always check the source before clicking through and reading an article posted by a friend and research the source if I’m unfamiliar with it (many friends have posted an ‘unbelievable’ story, only for me to find it’s from a satire site with only moderate digging). If it’s one of the trending news stories, I’ll scroll through the topic until I find a trusted source, or try to find one through Google.

I trust the reporting and fact-checking of the other three publications and frequently they cite sources I can check myself (especially if it’s a piece on a new report or study, I like to see the original document). I am aware that all media sources are capable of publishing inaccurate or fictitious information but the standards of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Guardian all strike me as high enough to be considered trustworthy.

I feel like ‘fake news’ is a very dangerous element of our current media environment. As noted in the two TED Talk videos for this week, fake news can overwhelm or cast doubt on legitimate information, or create biased ‘echo chambers’.

In the early days of the internet, when it seemed like 60% of email was some form of chain hoax letter (‘FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD:FWD: Did You Know????’ should be the title of an urban legend compilation, if it isn’t already),  I developed a deep skepticism towards what I read on the internet, which I feel has served me fairly well over the years. For my first few years on Facebook, I felt the need to correct every piece of fake or biased news my friends posted, but at this point it feels like such a flood of stories that I just apply my standards to what I read and post. The exception to this is if I post a comedy or satire piece and a friend reposts it thinking it’s real, as I then feel responsible for any confusion and will comment stating that the piece is comedic and fictional (frequently my friends will delete their post after I do this).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Project #1-Topic 2 (Television Show)

Media & Society-Week 9