Interactivity

The way I use media today is amazing and its accessibility and speed is unimaginable. Mostly, I enjoy the interactivity aspect of modern media. I use Yahoo to send mail to friends and family members and Skype to talk and see people who live far away. These types of media make it very easy to stay in touch with everyone; years ago, this kind of interaction took up a lot of time and money, but today it has gotten so easy and inexpensive! I also really like my cell phone. If the GPS in a car doesn’t work, I can look up directions on my phone, I can call and email people, I can listen to music, take pictures and videos, and it connects to the internet. On the internet, I also like to use search engines such as Google for everything from homework to movie show times, and look up information on Wikipedia. I also frequently visit news sites such as BBC, New York Times and the Associated Press. However, the type of media I use most often is television (CNN, Democracy Now).


Except for my blog, I don’t create web content, but I appreciate the fact that people can post information on the internet (such as the human-rights violation videos we talked about in class) because it gives regular people access to information that governments and corporations want to keep hidden. It really gives people a better opportunity to make decisions than we ever had in the past.


So, it looks like my relationship with media is mostly based on the idea of interactivity: I like to interact with the information available to me from media sources, and I like to be able to interact with people I care about using new media.