Wednesday, October 1, 2008
200 words on the media
The media on television today has become something with a purpose solely on grabbing the viewer's attention and being able to keep that attention long enough to convince them to refrain from touching their remote throughout the commercial break. This point is sad but true. Local news networks embellish the most insignificant events around the area just so that the viewer will be glued to their seat. Sadly, it works much of the time. They always leave you with a cliffhanger or a foreshadow to their next coverage. The nationwide broadcasting companies such as CNN or Fox news try to keep your attention by focusing on one point for hours at a time. If an interesting story comes up they cover that story until there is nothing left to say about it, and then they continue to talk about it more. They pick certain things such as the woman whose daughter was killed and went partying the next night. They will continue to cover this story over and over again praying for a development. Both CNN and Fox discuss the upcoming election to the point where i cannot take it anymore. I would like to hear about other things going on in the country, not about Obama's trip to Nowhere, Oklahoma where he accused McCain of not caring about the working class. And i honestly do not care about what type of hamburger Sarah Palin got on her visit to a local McDonald's. Overall, I just wish news programs would inform me of interesting happenings of the day and not beat those topics until they die slowly.
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Blogs can be very interesting that reach many different topics for each persons different hobbies/work/school. I rarely read blogs because i usually dont have time to read them, sometimes I will read a sports blog on ESPN or yahoo every once in a while. Blogs are good for people to read though because different people can express how they feel on a topic. People have different opinions on politics, sports, and etc. The thing that they arent good for is that if you are trying to do a report it is not a reasonable source of information because it is one person's opinion and not an actual fact. Blogs are very interesting to write; For instance, the one time i did respond to a blog was when I was bragging about our high school baseball team over a website of other high schools talking about our team. It is weird writing a blog because any person in the world can find and read the blog you wrote on. Its like talking to a person you have never met before. In my case, I was talking to a person about something that mattered to me and i had never even met the person. It is like 2 gangs talking about why their gang is better and bragging. It was a weird experienced. A new website that i recently found out you can write blogs on is facebook. Facebook is cool because it is a way of communicating with people that you know and some that you dont. The other part of facebook is that it is private to everyone except people that are you friends. I recently read a blog where a person talked about their first day of college and how different it was from high school. I am very media literate. I do everything technology has to offer if it is texting, watching tv, going on the internet. I know how to multitask and converge all these medias together. My parents are kinda media literate. My parents know how to work a lot of media including tv, internet, but they still know how to read a book and not worry if they are watching channel 881 compared to channel 2 as they did as kids. All my friends are just like me in the same sense that they all know how to work all these different medias including cell phone, internet, and t.v.. Also, my friends converge a lot of these different medias. Movies, Video games are a huge part of my friends life and i can imagine a world without all these different medias. The way i choose which different t.v shows to watch is very random. I watch science fiction shows like fringe compared to comedies as The Office. My choices of television is very broad and I can watch a lot of different types of shows. I do watch a lot of sports. People are abandoning maps in my opinion as a media. Imagine going down the I-5 back to California and instead of pulling out a huge map someone can now get the directions on their phone. Different media is changing the way people live their lives. After i took the quiz i was in the 78 percentile compared to the 50 average america had. I still know alot about the government even though I dont tune out politics.
I have never been on a blog sight like this, but I have followed popular blogs a lot. Like Spencer said Espn sports blogs are fun to read, Bill Simmons is really good for NBA season. I'll also read blogs that are funny, like Maddox.xmission.com I keep going to that when Im bored on the computer and need something to laugh at. So I guess you could I care about blogs. Its like reading a magazine to me.
Jordan, I totally agree with you here. The media is really just trying to focus on the little details to keep us interested, and it's ruining the news. I was stuck at a bus station and had to watch a snippet of some news channel or other. They actually had four reporters more or less screaming at each other and debating on the success of the vice presidential debate. During this, the station took a clip of Palin winking at the audience. Rather than showing it once and being done with it, they replayed it over and over about nine or ten times, until it looked like Palin was having some sort of seizure on stage. The whole thing was absolutely ridiculous.
Agreed. We get splashed with so much useless sh*t floating along in the current media stream! Are we really that dense that we can't handle the important stuff? Or is that just how we are perceived... that's probably it. To learn about things that really matter we have to dig and dig deep. Most of us only know enough to cover the surface with a very thin layer of information. At this rate I'm going to need a bigger shovel. Or back-ho. Yeah that might work... maybe.
Well wow. That is a little bit depressing, Jordan, keeping in mind that we're taking a class that's required for majoring in journalism. I'm wondering while I'm reading all these blogs for our 201 class that since we're all dissing the media so much, is it the goal of some of the class who are majoring in journalism to like...change the world when they get a job? Or is this kind of it - will we all sell out and become what we're calling fake and excessive?
Ya! Blog is interesting. I always read my friends blogs to know how they making out. Blog bring surprise to me sometimes because I saw some people's articles are awesome as an author. I know that there is an author who become famouse by her blog which has lots of viewers. So, probably runing a blog could be a way of becoming famouse!!
I agree that tv news is sensational. It's extravagant, even. Television mixed with news is an interesting and seemingly logical combination, but too often it just feels like "Hollywood Times." The fact is, newscasters are battling for viewers attention. They have to keep you interested enough to sit through multiple mindless and ridiculously loud commercials and curious enough to stay and see what happens next in their stories, not vear off into the stories of other tv stations. I believe that there are still many informative things about tv news stations, though. I think you just have to be smart as a viewer. As more and more ways to view media become available, we, as consumers, have to get smarter about what information we consume. What we need to do instead of demanding that the views on tv, however biased or sensational, change, is to search out more viewpoints from all angles, from all biases, from all sides. That way, we can hopefully get a more well-rounded view.
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