Media is Everything...and Everything is Media

As I read the first article in the reading this week, I found very interesting the correlation between media and function in Western Society. The new media displacing the old, narrowcasting and niche media as the future of media seems very nonchalant only because we are currently living in it. 

The analogy of the phone phone being a swiss army knife, and how the author was unable to find a single function phone because nobody wanted them brought up a very startling point. Our current society thrives on media and free labor to the point where each individual has become a function of media, which you are defined by. The modern cell phone is a great example, the iPhone, brings the media to you, allows you to own, manipulate, and believe that you control media. The iPhone gives you state of the art media power...as long as you pay your fees. It seems like the flow of television has been adapted into a multimedia existence, a mass convergence, that pervades every individuals daily life, your life becomes a flow of its own which traps you.

My example: How long can you go without checking your facebook? Facebook itself is a surveillant media in which your constant usage does in fact define you and your potential "function" in society (in society...and to corporations). Even resistance to this new media makes you a target of other consumer markets.

Next time you look at your facebook, look at the advertisements and you may notice they are tailored to your likes and dislikes according to your profile. The facebook beacon was a built in advertisement system which sent information from external sites to facebook. So, for instance, if you bought a movie ticket off fandango this information would go to facebook and notify your friends on the movie you were allegedly going to see. This function was eventually turned off because it disturbed many users. 

So the only TV show I ever watch on TV is Lost, I highly dislike watching it online which makes me a sucker to the "liveness

The only show I ever watch on TV is Lost, I actually dislike watching it online greatly, which makes me a sucker to the "liveness" television provides. So, instead I watched Supernatural, a show I primarily watched while doing the dishes, it was okay. I watched it online and what I had deemed to be a fairly masculine show actually made me feel emasculated due to the frequent tampon advertisements which made clear the intended audience. The website though for the CW seemed constructed to facilitate niche media. There were a plethora of interviews, games, and forums which felt immediately like a contained flow, distractions and interruptions working towards a common goal of sucking people in.

The forums and blogs were hilarious by the way, a potpourri of love and hate that really didn't know what it wanted, a collective feeding the media power.